


These skies are breaking

by Reikah



Category: Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Cyberpunk, Fai's early series death wish, KuroFai Olympics, Kurogane's no good very bad day, M/M, Revolutionaries, Science Fiction, Transhumanism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-05
Updated: 2013-04-05
Packaged: 2020-03-01 04:25:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 37,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18792940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reikah/pseuds/Reikah
Summary: A city living in the shadow of a last great war; a mysterious - and dangerous - threat inside the walls; and a blond idiot, more machine than man, connected to it all that he thinks he used to know... Captain Kurogane Suwa of the city watch is about to find himself living through some very interesting times indeed.It was the gleam of gold amidst the grey that first caught Kurogane's eye.





	These skies are breaking

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Dreamwidth 2013 Kurofai Olympics, Future vs Fantasy: I was team Future and my prompt was "vengeance is a dish best served cold".

It was the gleam of gold amidst the grey that first caught Kurogane's eye.

The train station was dull and miserable in the rain, and his parents were quiet and still together on the metal bench under the concrete shelter, waiting side-by-side with their hands clasped and his mother's face pale with exhaustion. The med-district was on the opposite end of the city-dome to their home, and they'd already caught two trains to get back from it. This would be their third. It was not yet mid-day, and the glass sky above their heads remained as dark and sullen as it had been from dawn. When they'd set out, his father had made a feeble joke about raising the weather technician's pay for some sunshine; but there was no energy left in either of his parents for joking now.

"We'll explore all available options," the doctors had said, emphatically and repeatedly. They'd been very kind, and regretful in their own manner. Kurogane hadn't known what that meant, but he saw in his parents' reactions that it was nothing good, and now his chest was all tied up in knots, his stomach churning like he'd eaten something bad and might throw up. His mother had been calm and very accepting. That just kind of made it worse.

Out here, the trains ran slower and less often, and their train home wasn't due for another forty minutes. It was because the station was near the taminant district on the south side of the dome, and taminants were bad news. Nobody really came here if they could, and the taminants rarely ventured out of the only part of the city they were accepted, for a given value of 'accepted'.

His mother coughed softly from the bench, and Kurogane, tight-jawed, kicked at the grey muddy water of a nearby puddle. There was nothing he could do, he was seven years old and not a doctor - and he hated every minute of it. He kicked at the puddle again, sending a spray of dirty water over the side of the station and onto the gravel below, and then, irate, he darted to the next puddle down and kicked that, too. Neither of his parents called him back, and there was something satisfying about the violence. 

Kurogane didn't notice the golden glint until he had already made his way down half the platform, roaring and jumping forcefully in the rain water to watch it splash and ripple like he was a baby again, or a toddler. He had just jumped down with both feet at once into a larger pool - imagining, as he did so, that the pool of dark rain water was the face of the doctor who had shaken his head at his mother - when he saw it. Glittering, the bright long threads hanging on the chain fence at the end of the platform looked something like hair... and that left him curious and cautious at the same time. He half-turned to shout back down along the platform for his father when he heard the muffled whimper.

The chain fence ringed the platform and extended a ways down the track, the better to protect the railway line's customers from having to encounter any unsavoury denizens of the district in the flesh. There were no breaks, not even a ticket-barrier; you exited the station on the other platform past the guards. Since the station was raised, Kurogane had to come quite close to the chain fence and squint down to see the figure curled in a bundle on the other side, whose head didn't even reach the same level as his feet. The figure was small, wrapped in a black jacket with its head bent forward and its back to him, its hair the same pale gold as the locks tangled up in the fence, and Kurogane cautiously curled his fingers into the links in the chain and rattled it. 

"Oi," he said. "You okay?"

The figure was on its feet within the blink of an eye, spinning around and dropping into a stance that Kurogane recognised from his father's students. It was a boy, possessed of sharp blue eyes and a coldly indifferent expression, but Kurogane was proud enough of knowing his stance that he grinned at the stranger. "Aikido, right?" he said. "My dad teaches that in the Red district. Where do you study?"

The boy shifted back a step, caution replacing the indifference, but he didn't drop his stance, and he didn't answer. The rain had soaked his hair to his face - and what hair it was, too, long and straight as a girl's, hanging almost to his hips. His eyes were very blue, and his skin was weirdly pale, paler even than Kurogane's mother's in the face of her illness. The black jacket had come a little undone, exposing one shoulder and a good portion of his chest, and the sleeve slipped over his left hand, too long or akimbo. The bare shoulder was already speckling with tiny globes of water, and as Kurogane watched a drop slid from his hairline and down the curve of his nose. Kurogane nodded at him. "Aren't you cold?" 

"My core temperature remains at thirty-seven degrees," the boy said, awkwardly. 

_Oh,_ Kurogane thought, knowing from the odd phrasing now what the boy was. Some of his neighbours were terrified of them; their district still signs up forbidding them entry, remnants of the first years after the war. His father, though... His father had always commanded him to treat these people with respect. "They give their lives every day for this city," he'd said, and Kurogane glanced back along the platform at the stone shelter. He couldn't see either of his parents from here. He reached up and carefully worked the hank of blond hair free from the fence, noticing as he did so the way the blond's eyes fixated on it.

"Here. This is yours, right?" He pushed the locks through the fence a little, enough for the stranger to reach up and take them back if he wanted. The boy tilted his head to one side. "My dad told me this stuff matters to you lot. Um, biological material, that is."

The boy leaned forward almost gracefully on the balls of his feet, his fingers reaching up to pluck the hair from Kurogane's grip. He staggered a little as his centre of balance shifted, and his knee seemed to dip. His face remained stony and aloof, and his voice, when he spoke, was so quiet it was barely audible over the rain. "Yes," he said. "Only our organic matter."

 _They don't have much of it left, some of them,_ his father had said, sitting at the dinner table in his black and silver uniform, just before his mother shushed him. _To a taminant, their remaining flesh and blood and bone is very precious._

Kurogane knew he shouldn't be talking to the boy any more. Taminants weren't quite _right_ , living as they did in their own districts or even outside the dome. Some of them went out into the Machine Wastes to do battle with the dark, evil things living out there, right out into the toxic air outside the glass wall. Variation after variation of urban legend had sprung up concerning their risk of bringing the virus back into the dome with them, carriers of the plague that had brought down civilisations. Taminants weren't welcome in the rest of the city-dome. The boy looked harmless enough, if cold and machine-like; but what did Kurogane know? He _ought_ to go back to his parents, to his pale, ill mother. 

Instead he said, "What are you doing out here?"

The blond paused in the act of attempting to knot his hank of lost hair back onto the remaining lot attached to his head. "Working," he said briefly. "That's what we're for."

Kurogane curled his fingers against the chain links, frowning. "Are you one of those taminants people hire as maids and stuff?"

"No," the boy said, immediately. He let his hands fall, still clutching the loose lock of hair. "I was not accepted onto the Hireling program." There was something shadowed in his face, and Kurogane didn't understand. He took a step back, and Kurogane thought there was something odd about his gait - something stiff and locked up. "Can I help you further?"

It just blurted out of him, without conscious effort on his part - his parents had always noted, with some fond bewilderment, that their son was a fiery little creature who said what he thought. "Is it true," he asked curiously, "That you people carry the plague back into the dome sometimes?"

The blond taminant didn't answer him immediately. He just stared up at Kurogane, unblinking as the rain poured into his eyes, until Kurogane became uncomfortable and shifted, breaking eye contact for a second. Then he moved, tucking his lost hair into a pocket of his black coat, and adjusted it over his shoulders, popping the collar with his thumbs until it obscured his mouth and nose. His eyes, bright in the gloom, were the cool blue of sapphires. "Would you still call us 'you people' if I said yes?" he asked, and he sounded weary now, but he spoke quickly, in a low voice. "We're safe. You naturals - you call us taminants, for the decontaminants we have to bathe in when we come back from outside, and you forget _why_." He placed one of his pale hands over his chest and bobbed his head to Kurogane briefly. "I'm no threat to you, natural child. I'm alone. Don't -"

"Why do you talk like that?" Kurogane interrupted, stung by the derision in _you naturals_. "All like a - like a machine. Nobody _else_ talks like that, it's weird."

For a moment a flicker-flash of emotion passed across the blond's face, although Kurogane could not have said what it was. Malice, maybe; hate - or victory, or sorrow. The taminant drew his arms across his chest, hugging himself tightly, and tilted his head to one side. "It's not weird. I am a machine," said the blond. "I watched them take my heart out of my chest and replace it with a metal one. I watched them cut off my legs and put shiny metal ones on instead." He tapped his knee joint, the one that had buckled under him earlier and was even now misshapen beneath his black trousers, and Kurogane realised he was standing on the other leg. "I'm a machine, so I talk like one. I'm a man-made machine man, and _you_ like it when we talk differently so that you can remember that we _are_ different."

This was a little too hostile even for Kurogane's curiosity and inherited tolerance. "You're _cyborgs_ ," he said scornfully, "You're not _machines_ , you just have metal implants. They help you live longer and do things we can't. My dad told me that." He nodded at the taminant's weird knee joint. "That's metal, right? Why's it misbehaving?"

In answer the blond bent down, hooking his fingers around the trouser cuff of that leg, and began rolling the material up; past segmented snaking cables winding around the smaller rotary servo of his ankle, over a thick plate replacing his shin, to a dented and bashed-in metal patella. "I met something outside the dome," he said, and Kurogane, still staring at that hammered-in artificial knee-cap, could feel the boy's cold blue eyes on him. There was something challenging in them, but Kurogane didn't know how to rise to that challenge. 

Abruptly he felt the gulf between them for the first time; himself, fierce student of his father's martial art, the son of the Commander of the city guard - and this pale nobody, a cyborg who went outside the dome to do battle with humanity's enemies. Unable to think of anything to say, he said, tongue thick and clumsy, "Aren't your parents worried about you?"

The blond snorted. "They're dead," he said matter-of-factly. "Or at least, so I think."

Kurogane tried to imagine not caring if his parents lived or died, and couldn't. It came dangerously close to his thoughts about his mother, the rage and mingled terror he'd felt as he smashed the perfect surfaces of the puddles on the train platform to smithereens with his boots. "Don't you miss them?" he said, and his voice sounded quiet and uncertain even to himself. His mother was - she was his mother, and he bought her gifts from the marketplace and he helped her plant her flowerpots and window boxes and trotted at her heels, and he only had one mother and he - he didn't want to lose her, and he didn't want to sound so _jaded_ about it. Not like this taminant boy.

"Should I?" The taminant sounded more confused than anything else. He slowly rolled his trouser leg down. "I don't... remember them, not well. I don't think they miss me, or... or would, if they are alive." He hesitated. "I miss... I had a... I had a - no." He shook his head, as if to loosen a persistent thought. "He wouldn't care either. Not about me."

The rain was starting to slow, but the sky was still the same miserable shade of grey. The taminant boy remained the brightest thing around, all soft golds and distant, lost blue eyes. Kurogane breathed out quietly and thought of his mother, riding in the car with her on her way to the market, holding their ration cards tightly and being proud of being entrusted with the shopping basket. "Everyone has somebody who cares about them," he said, slowly. "I remember... a woman saying that to my mother. She had long black hair, and she pinched me and laughed at my puppy fat." He pulled a face in indignation; he was son of Commander Suwa of the city guard, a valiant fighter who would one day grow up to guard the dome and its inhabitants just as his father did. 

The taminant boy was still watching him, a disbelieving expression on his face. Kurogane puffed up his chest, bristling. "What, you think I'm a liar? I'm never a liar!"

"I didn't say anything," the taminant pointed out.

"You _looked_ like you thinking it," Kurogane snapped back. "Why don't you come up here and say so? I studied Akido too!"

The boy's lips moved silently, the corners of his mouth crooking up. "You're not a machine-man," he said softly, "And I'm sixteen centimetres taller than you. I appreciate the offer, but it wouldn't be right to fight you. Perhaps later, when you're... bigger."

Kurogane drew in a breath to tell him that he'd taken down bigger and meaner opponents than some _idiot_ blond who thought he could talk down to Kurogane just because he had metal parts when a harsh _BLART_ rent the air of the station. A canned announcement echoed across its concrete, announcing the incoming train home, and Kurogane whirled around to see his parents beginning to emerge from the shelter, his father holding an umbrella over his wife's head and looking around the platform, no doubt for him. He waved briefly, and his father smiled and waved back, beckoning him down to the station.

"You should go find that person who cares about you," Kurogane said, turning back to the taminant. The blond was still standing there, wet and lonely-looking. "I'm sure they've been worried about you."

The blond raised his head. Rainwater dripped quietly from his chin. "You're a... good person, aren't you? What's your name?"

Kurogane considered not telling him, and then his dad ruined the mystery by yelling it loudly, summoning him to them and the oncoming train. Its dull horn blasts were rattling around the platform, and the puddles of slick dark water were quivering, all a-jitter with ripples. "Kurogane," he said, grumpily, and turned to go. Something made him stop, however, although he couldn't have said why. "Listen - what were you doing out here?"

He'd thought the blond wouldn't answer, but instead the taminant tilted his head to one side and smiled widely. It didn't reach his eyes, and it looked both gaping and false. "Waiting," he said. "Waiting for a train. Go home, little Kurogane."

Kurogane was already on his way to the train, but that last remark had him spin back, unable to see the blond over the rise in the platform, and bellow, "Don't _call_ me insulting names! I'm not a little boy!"

"Youou," scolded his mother, taking him by the wrist. "What poor soul are you shouting at?"

Kurogane thought about telling her about the taminant boy, and then looked at his father and decided not to. "I was trying to scare some birds, mother," he said quietly. He had known he shouldn't be talking to taminants, and both of his parents looked so _tired_ in a way he had never seen before and that scared him half to death. He was suddenly full of a burning need to let his mother know that he would never forget her, the way the blond boy had forgotten his parents; but when he tried to say so, his tongue got all fat and stupid in his mouth, and instead he stared fiercely down at his shoes as the train dragged slowly to a halt, the carriage doors opening in front of them with a soft _hiss_.

As they drew away from the station he pressed his face against the window, hoping for a glimpse of the boy below the platform, through the chain link fence. Instead he saw barbed wire, and a sign announcing _Taminant District Station_.

It wasn't the best parting. It wasn't the best meeting, either, and sometimes in later years Kurogane would think back over it and wonder what became of the blond boy. Not often, or frequently, because that encounter was eclipsed later on that day by another event, more life-shattering and devastating by far. 

That was the evening Kurogane's parents were murdered.

* * *

( _If you could have anything from me --_

_Let me die._

_I'm sorry. I can't do that. You could never afford it. Give me another wish._

_I... I want to die. But first I..._

_Yes?_

_I want to make them bleed._ )

* * *

It was dark and musty in Kurogane's office. The only natural lightning came from a single tiny window, which was covered over by a thin film of dust and which allowed in only a solitary beam of sunlight, illuminating the tangled snarl of cables and stacked boxes of bullets and dismantled weaponry littering the floor. There was a slim pathway between the door and the desk, forged out of the clutter by the simple expedient of "picking everything up that was in the way and throwing it out of the fucking way," because Kurogane possessed many traits of which the smallest and meanest was patience.

The office was not a small room. It just seemed that way due to the debris filling it, and also the presence of Kurogane, a big, broad-shouldered men hunched over a desk sized to a much smaller man's measurements, squinting at his display screen and wondering if he would be able to bill Requisitions for a new one if he hurled the thing out through his tiny office window.

Six days now the network had been playing up. The Tech boys were supposed to have taken it all offline to install the latest security stuff, but that ought to have been finished with yesterday. They were still experiencing intermittent blackouts. The boys had posted an announcement apologising for the delay and claiming they had technicians working on it, but Kurogane wasn't a fucking moron, even if the Tech boys were. Network delays _could_ be caused by their programs, maybe, but in his decade of experience in this job, it meant the Heurists were coming.

He'd been against the use of networked security software from the start, him and a few of the other Guard-Captains. Heurists lived and breathed programming. It was to them what words were to the great play writers. They were forged of the stuff, sculpted in it and of it. When the machines had begun their assault so many years ago, it was the networked computers of humanity's civilisation that led to the end - as they taught in school history lessons nowadays. And yet the current Commander of the guard had been willing to let the restriction slip, citing the increased efficiency of a network as reason enough to risk it.

"It's been almost two centuries since the Heurists were set loose on our world," she'd argued. "I very much doubt they remember what our programs look like, and even if they did, _we_ don't. We'll be writing a new language just for us here. We can't keep defending the dome with nothing but cannons, or relying on taminant scouts to predict an incursion."

With the new network, she'd gone on to argue, they could set up spy-cameras in the Machine Wastes outside the dome walls; they could line the routes between the dome and its supply-chains at the plantations and mines with hardware to defend the conveys that brought essentials like food and raw materials to the city. And although Kurogane had thought she was wrong, he hadn't argued beyond a bare minimum, because she was his cousin - and he knew from firsthand experience that Commander Kendappa did not suffer undermining and dissent from her Guard-Captains gladly.

He'd grown up with her, more or less. Her, his aunt, and her younger sister, his other cousin. They'd been the ones to take him in after that awful day, when he woke to shattering glass, and made his way into his parents' room in time to see the figure in the white mask pulling the knife from his mother's chest. 

The worst part about the murder had been the way he'd been ignored by the man who did it - who had come into his childhood home, had ruined the sense of sanctuary such a place was supposed to have - and who had so casually and thoughtlessly ended the lives of those Kurogane loved. It was enough to make white-hot rage burn and bubble and seethe in his gut, even now. Just thinking of the man in white made his teeth clench so hard he could hear them grinding; made his hands curl into fists. Those hands had been far smaller back then, but he had still charged the murderer, vision almost whited out with the strength of his anger - and then blacked out by a simple blow to the head. When he picked himself up off the floor, the assassin had already been gone from the window, and he'd not been able to catch up while the room spun and he was filled with the urge to vomit.

(Concussion, the hospital had told his aunt Sonomi, before they released him to her care. Concussion, but nothing broken. Kurogane disagreed.)

Kurogane took a sip of his coffee, closing down his email while the network still failed to load. He kept two computers on his desk, including an old-fashioned, reliable one, completely without any access to either internet or other computer. All data had to transferred to or off it by a portable storage device. It was archaic, but it worked just fine, and he kept most of his paperwork on it.

The section of dome border Kurogane was in charge of, as its Captain and gate-keeper, was one of the more mediocre sections. He was still a captain, but the stretch of the boundaries that he guarded - the north-western stretch, from the northern gate along the curve of the dome to just before the western gate - tended not to weather as many attacks as the other three sections. The southern and eastern gates supplied the food from the plantations in the greenlands and the western gate brought in fish from their fortress by the sea, both of which they absolutely needed and the machines knew they absolutely needed, but the northern gate provided them with ore from the mines. 

Heurists weren't stupid. They knew starving humanity out had more effect than keeping them from their ore. If the network failures signalled an attack, it'd most likely be at the western gate, just beyond his jurisdiction; the western gate and the south-western wall belonged to a different Captain. That didn't mean he couldn't keep his men prepared.

Along the fifty-kilometre span of the border that was his to protect, Kurogane had almost a hundred all-natural troops under his command. He had seven heavy assault batteries, three anti-aircraft launchers, sixteen deployable tanks and two of the city's best snipers, using massive rifles custom-designed to launch shells created for the express purpose of busting Heurist casing. He also had a compliment of roughly three hundred taminant wastewalkers, on loan to him from the various companies that chartered their equipment and implants: Reed Pharmaceuticals, Recourt Recoveries and Sakurazukamori Research. With these troops he was to guard his stretch of wall against threats. 

He was young to be a Captain, and there were rumours it was because of who his father had been. Like most rumours, these were false; Clow Reed had appointed him for his service, and he had started the same as most of them, a seventeen-year-old apprentice to one of the gunners and rising over a decade through the Guard service to the rank of Sergeant, a position earned with blood and hard work. The last time the Heurists had come storming the wall in any force, he had personally manned one of the batteries and rained fire on the robots, until the Machine Wastes had been full of burning debris and the rest of the cold silicon-headed army had thought wiser of their invasion plans... for then.

His computer screen was as cluttered with documents as the rest of his office. The non-networked screen had sixteen different Heurist blueprints open, from the small skittering wheeled invaders used as shock troops and cannon-fodder to the gigantic four-legged Walkers almost fifty metres tall and bristling with arms. The Walkers hadn't been seen for coming up to fifty years, but Kurogane strongly believed there was no such thing as _too little preparation._

When the alarm sounded, he didn't even look up from the display - just allowed himself a cool smile, the corner of his mouth curving up sharply to reveal a hint of canine on that side. He had _guessed_ there would be Heurists and oh, he did so love to be right on this topic; not out of any desire to prove himself superior to the other men and woman of the guard but because if there was one thing that could quieten that vengeful roiling pit of rage inside his chest, it was blowing Heurists to fucking shrapnel using a lot of powerful explosives. He shoved his chair back and was out of the office before the red warning klaxon had blared three times.

* * *

The glass wall of the dome stretched out before him, silvery at its base with the extra thickness tacked on for protection. All along its perimeter extended a walkway for the people of the guard to stand their posts at their guns, the large, heavy cannons on the other side of the glass and controlled by computers on _this_ side. The lack of networking meant the computers were right up against the walls, and so were his guards. Four of the tanks were being rolled out of the garage by the gate, and the klaxon was still blaring as people in smart black uniforms jogged back and forth along the walkway, all hurrying to their posts. They drilled for just this event every day. Kurogane cast a lingering eye at one of the seven colossal assault cannons, his fingers flexing to slip around its grips and get to the business of blowing up the fucking invaders, but instead he turned down to the courtyard. 

"Monou," he barked, and his sergeant came over from the tank he'd been performing pre-drive checks on. Monou wasn't his first choice for his second-in-command. The man was far too easy-going. He was still one of the better drivers Kurogane had seen. "How many?"

"Morning, boss," Monou said as he approached with flat disregard for rank. He had a bad habit of dragging his fingers constantly through his hair, and it was already standing up every which-way even this early in the day. His eyes, behind his yellow glasses, were bright and sparking. Monou wanted a fight almost as much as Kurogane did. "Wastewalker band found them coming up the main road. Fourteen, twelve of which are the cannonfodder/bait type, plus one air unit and a Beetle."

Kurogane nodded acknowledgement, pulling his leather gloves on, and pulled his earpiece down, holding the line open with his thumbnail. "Captain Kurogane to all units on the Northwestern wall. Tanks on the Beetle, wall-guns for the cannonfodder. Get into your hazmat suits." He lifted his eyes over his sergeant's shoulder and nodded at the other tank drivers. "You lot get moving! Hazmat suits, get a fucking move on! Go, go!"

There was a renewed burst of industry along the walkway above. Two men and woman burst forth from the small med unit adjacent to the northern gate, with plastic-wrapped flexible hazmat suits for the tank drivers in their arms. Kurogane lifted his eyes from the courtyard to the walkway, and smirked down to the silent figure of the anti-aircraft guns. He knew where he was going to be.

There were only three ground-to-air guns missile batteries along his stretch of the dome's perimeter. The one nearest the gate was a hundred metres down the ringing walkway, not far away enough to justify taking one of the bikes, so Kurogane climbed the stairs from the courtyard to the walkway and made his way along the stretch, checking on his guardsmen as he did so. Their guns were loaded and ready. His snipers were in their position higher up, in a box suspended nearly a mile above them built into the glass dome wall itself. The assault batteries were manned (or - womanned, since the first one he came to had Souma sitting calmly behind its controls). The tanks were already rolling through the first of the six sets of doors that allowed entry or exit to the city.

When he'd been promoted to the rank of Captain, his aunt had thrown a celebratory party for him in her nice house in the very best residential district. As the CEO of Daidoujitek, the weaponry company she'd built up from the ground before Kurogane had been even born, Sonomi knew _People_ , something that had always made Kendappa's appointment seem suspect to many in the city. For Kurogane's promotion party, she'd invited all the big shots. Kurogane had never asked her to and had spent most of the party hiding in the kitchen, occasionally fending off his youngest cousin's requests for a dance.

"They came to see _you,_ Kurogane," Tomoyo had told him. "Mother has plans for you, you know. You say you want to be Commander like your father..."

"I do," Kurogane had insisted, stung. He'd swirled some more wine in his glass, staring mulishly down at it, and remembered, for some reason, the drive with his mother to the marketplace many years before. The ration cards in his hands. Rationing had finally been declared over and done with just two years before, but it was still taking time to get used to the glut of food and drink flowing into the city-dome from their farming plantations in the greenlands. "It's just... my dad didn't..."

He didn't want to talk about what his father had and hadn't done, not even with Tomoyo. He drained the wineglass and set it down hard on the countertop. "I don't fucking dance, brat."

Tomoyo had pouted at him, but she hadn't pressed him. She probably already knew. Tomoyo was wiser and more practical by far than her mother, even then. She'd reached across the table and gently laid one of her delicate little-girl hands over the top of his, big and scarred as it was; and she'd looked about to say something gentle and sympathetic, as if that could bring back his father or make it okay, so Kurogane had pulled his hand free and went out to the garden to have a cigarette. 

He'd moved out of Sonomi's house the day after. Her plans for him were not his plans. 

As a Captain of the guard Kurogane could man any of the city's defences. He was trained in hand-to-hand combat, energy weapons, marksmanship and could drive a tank with the best of them. No matter how he dealt out the violence he liked so much, he always fucking hated the wait between the taminant reports and the first sight of the machines. He had high-resolution cameras suspended further up in the walls, their lenses focused and zoomed in on the road display; his fingers were still and patient on the controls but his heel drummed a rapid beat against the ground as he squinted at the missile display, waiting for the first site of the machines. The taminants ranged up to five hundred kilometres around the city, scouting for any signs of incursions into the Machine Wastes. They'd spotted the Heurist raiding party just two hundred kilometres north of here, a distance the average Heurist could cover in an hour if need be; but a Beetle was not an average Heurist.

Kurogane quickly plugged one of his portable data stacks into the display to call up his stored blueprints of the machines, and emailed copies to every terminal along the walkway. First the skittering Cannonfodders, or "Bait" as the guards called them. Then the aerial machine, a droning, glider-esque device usually shaped like a paper aeroplane but with wider wings and a snug cannon held against its belly. Then, finally, the Beetle, a slow, heavy device stomping along on many small feet, laden with explosives and heavy arms. It'd be up to the tanks and the assault batteries to take out the Beetle, since their weapons had the highest calibres and had the best chance of piercing that thick, tough armour. He was very grateful that the Heurists seemed to have run out of Walkers of their own to throw at them; he'd never seen one in the flesh, but he'd seen video footage of them and they were terrifying to behold, immense and powerful and nigh-unstoppable.

His father had brought the last one down, only a boy of eighteen himself at the time. That had been how he earned the title of Commander. 

Kurogane switched the mic on his earpiece over to the private band between himself and that idiot Monou. "Sergeant, are you getting these blueprints?"

"No," Monou said, sounding unconcerned. "But it's fine, I've fought Beetles before, I know what to do, boss. So do the other drivers. Hey, how long you think it'll be 'til they get here?"

Kurogane glanced down at the tablet. "Three hours, with the Beetle. Settle in for the long haul. And it's 'Captain Kurogane,' not 'boss,' Sergeant. Don't forget it. I'm not your friend, I'm your superior officer, and all I want out of you is the ability to do your fucking job."

Monou paused a little before answering, and when he did his voice was more subdued. "Sir," he said. "Understood, sir."

"Good." Kurogane closed the band and sat back, gazing thoughtfully at the Beetle blueprint. Even as a series of white outlines on a blue background it was bulky and intimidating. If the tanks couldn't stop it and it reached the dome itself - well. Kurogane wouldn't let that happen. He was too strong now, too good at his job, and he might not be strong enough for what he wanted but he could stop a goddamn Beetle from kissing the glass wall, at the least.

At the very least.

* * *

Kurogane's first inkling that something wasn't right came with the three hour mark by which they should have been able to see the raiding party on the cameras and... didn't. The image of the road was magnified considerably, and Kurogane watched it like a hawk. There was no way he'd be able to miss the advance of the raiding party. He double-checked and triple-checked the tablet; even a Beetle could travel two hundred kilometres in three hours. To Kurogane that could mean one of two things: the taminant scouts had screwed up, or the machines weren't making for the gate at all, and if they weren't then the taminants should have followed them and alerted the city of any change in course. He felt a brief flash of irritation at them, not for the first time.

When he'd taken the post he'd expected dealing with the wastewalkers to be tough. Taminants were grouped into three seperate classes by abilities; the hirelings served as personal guards and aides to the rich naturals, the muncipals worked within the city as its mailmen and couriers and waste-collectors and electricians; and the wastewalkers roamed the Machine Wastes beyond the dome, scouting and watching out for invaders. He'd heard that the wastewalker taminants were the smartest, the bravest and the most dangerous physically, and he had intended to make use of their considerable talents of stealth and secrecy. 

Instead, he'd gotten three hundred sullen, near-mutinous cyborgs, who glared at him coldly from behind the veils and scarves they all wore to conceal their faces. It reminded him uncomfortably of the blond taminant boy from so long ago, and that in turn reminded him of what else had happened that day, and all in all Kurogane preferred to have nothing to do with his petulant taminant scouts. They came and went; handed in reports, transferred to or from other sections of the dome's perimeter, did their jobs without any interference from him. Occasionally they died on duty and he had to write to the companies that had provided them to request replacements, but he tried not to think too hard about that, either.

"Sir?" His earpiece drew his attention back to the display showing the camera footage. It wasn't Monou, it was the communications tech, a thin, quiet man of twenty-one. "We've just hailed by the scouting party." He sounded hesitant and awkward, and that drew Kurogane's hackles up.

"Where the hell are they? And where the hell are the machines?" he demanded, and the communications tech swallowed audibly. Most of the men on the wall found Kurogane terrifying, with his frequent bouts of black temper. 

"The head scout wanted me to - to tell you 'Do not worry'."

" _What_? Get me connected to him!" Kurogane barked. "I need some answers here. Now!"

There was a delay while the tech guy did whatever it was he did with the wireless communication between the dome and the scouting bands, while Kurogane sat at the anti-aircraft gun and seethed. How dare some idiot scrap-headed taminant tell _him_ , Captain of the north-western boundary, not to worry about Heurists? That was his fucking _job_! Who did the moron think he was? Did he not understand how serious it was?

"Sir? Putting you through in three - two - one -"

"Who is this?" Kurogane demanded as soon as the static that indicated a long-distance connection flared up. There was no immediate response, so he repeated the question again, louder; and almost a third time when abruptly the static died down and a third voice said, mildly, "That's rude of you to shout. Who is _this?_?"

Kurogane bristled. "Captain Kurogane of the north-western -"

"Oh, I know who you are," said the scout leader, sounding almost cheerful. In the background, something went _CLONK_ loudly enough Kurogane flinched. "Sorry, dropped something. I'm on my way down to you, Captain Kuro-gan of the north-western -"

"It's _KUROGANE_ ," Kurogane hissed, outraged. His name wasn't that fucking _complicated_ and he would not suffer it to be mauled by some dumb scout. "Four syllables, not three!"

There was a pause, and then the scout leader said, slyly, "Not Kuro-tan? But that suits you so much better -"

"Are you some kind of cretin?" Kurogane asked sharply, and the scout laughed. He had a rich, deep laugh, at odds with his soft voice. 

"Oh yes," he said. "Not just any kind of cretin, I'm the biggest there is. Look at the road, Kuro-tetchy; we're coming down. And 'Kuro-tetchy' has four syllables, too!"

Kurogane ground his teeth so fiercely the noise made the man at the gun next to him glance over, worried, only to immediately put his eyes back on his weapon after Kurogane sent him a filthy look. He tapped the tablet, waking it up from "sleep" mode and holding it up suspiciously, squinting at the distant road. The image was magnified as best as the resolution could be already, but he magnified it further, squinting at the blotchy pixels as he scanned the image for movement. If this idiot taminant had news, it must be big indeed to sprint back to the city himself, and so Kurogane would hear him out before he sent him back to whichever company had provided him for a replacement. He should probably look into that while he waited. 

"I need that scout's profile," he said to the tech guy, still staring at the magnified image, and within seconds his screen bleeped an incoming transmission at him. Impatiently he minimised the camera feed and opened the file the technician had sent: Fai 'D' Fluorite, official designation Delta#12. Classed as a wastewalker scout twenty-nine years ago, at the age of six. Cybernetic implants: pretty much everything, he was estimated to have less than 0.5% organic material remaining, most of which seemed composed of brain matter. There was no picture. His charter company was Reed Pharmaceuticals, although he was also part-owned by Recourt Recoveries; taken due to unpaid medical debt, then. Probably not his own, if he'd been six, although you heard stories...

The making of a taminant was also something Kurogane refused to think about.

His file noted that this "Fai" spoke seven languages, four of them dead since the fall of the countries that spoke them. It said that he had a marksmanship score of 1, the highest possible on their scale; that he was skilled in four forms of hand-to-hand combat, and that he had achieved respectable results on the computer programming scale. That was in itself unusual, since taminants weren't normally allowed to study programming. He switched the ear piece back to the band with the scout. "Oi, listen," he said without preamble, "What do we need to know about the machines?"

Fai hummed briefly and tunelessly. "I told you not to worry about it, Kuro-four-syllables."

"I'm the _Captain_ of this stretch of the boundary," Kurogane argued, fiercely. "I worry about what I need to worry about, and don't you think, even for a second, that those stupid fucking names are forgiven."

The idiot just laughed. "As you command, Captain," he said, "You ought to be able to see us with your spying eyes soon, anyway."

And so Kurogane watched, at first with annoyance and then with growing disbelief, as on the tablet appeared a small blurred figure that grew larger and larger and larger and into the Beetle, marching steadily along, alone without its escort; and as a blob on its back resolved itself into a man, sitting side-saddle serenely as the great machine ploughed steadily down the road toward the northern gate. His men were staring too; murmurs began to spring up, and then got louder as the Beetle approached with its rider still sat there in control.

( _Man-made machine man,_ said the boy at the train station in the back of Kurogane's mind, his voice soft and distant.)

"Please don't fire at us," said the scout leader pleasantly in Kurogane's ear when two of the tanks began to roll forward. "This big fellow is quite harmless. He's just a puppet, you see, controlled remotely by one of the Heurists."

Kurogane hesitated before passing the order, remembering the sullen and mutinous expressions on the faces of his wastewalkers. _Never trust a taminant,_ said the wisdom; _they're plague-carriers, and bitter besides. Bitter because we're everything they're not._

Protocol insisted he have the Beetle destroyed anyway, and he refused to allow it beyond the boundary and through the gate; but he could not have said why he did not give the order for the scout to dismount from it and let it be destroyed. Memory of another blond taminant boy, maybe, wet and sad, holding his hair in his hand. Half a percent of organic matter remaining. He zoomed in on the rider as the Beetle continued onward, on his artificial face and long snarl of blond hair peppered with the sleek grey and black of thick cables, all of the chaos bound into a messy ponytail; on his blue synthetic eyes, empty and fake. 

"Well," Monou said happily, "Now I really can say I've seen something the guys in the pub haven't."

"Shut up, Sergeant."

* * *

It took a while for Fai to be processed through the decontamination cycle. Kurogane paced back and forth in the courtyard, scowling through the glass dome wall at the figure outside of the Beetle, already swarming with weaponry technicians in hazmat suits while the tanks stood guard. Fai was in the midst of the scrub down past the first set of gates, his arms above his head and smiling inanely at the cameras in the walls of the gate partition as machines blasted near-boiling water at him and other machines washed him down with fresh padding. Then would come the sterilising steam; then the drying process. Fai had been roaming the wilderness for six months, and could be carrying ridiculous quantities of the virus on him or in his clothing (which had been removed and incinerated already).

Naked, the marks of what he was were plain for the entire compliment of naturals to see. His skin was rubbery and pale and manufactured, stretched hurriedly over metal planes. His stint out in the wilderness had left the fake dermis layer with rents in some places, revealing the shiny grey steel beneath. His hair, up-close, was too thick to be real; his face had been sculpted from plates welded together with the rubber-skin stretched out over the front, and his nose was very sharp and angular, all straight sided with no curves.

Once Kurogane realised that, it was like the alienness of the taminant man became more plain to see. He _didn't_ curve, not anywhere. Any part of his body that should have been a smooth, rounded line, wasn't; instead it was composed of lots of sharp straight lines following each other at angles, like some very old low-resolution pixellated art. His shoulders and his buttocks were the second-worst offenders for this strangeness, Kurogane couldn't help but notice, his eyes dragged southward out of curiosity; but it wasn't even some strange sexual curiosity, for like all taminants, Fai was as smooth and shapeless between his legs as a child's doll. Taminants didn't need to expel bodily waste. They didn't need to procreate. Genitals had been deemed a pointless excess.

It took twenty minutes for Fai to end the decontamination process, don the black uniform of a wastewalker from a terminal provided, and saunter proudly out into the courtyard. He didn't look remotely fazed by the queer looks the rest of the guards kept shooting him; nor did he seem perturbed by Kurogane's death glare. Instead he strolled right up to him, saluted him - lazily - and said, "You look just like I thought you would, Kuro-grouchy."

"Give me one good reason why I shouldn't send you back to Reed and Recourt," Kurogane snarled, incensed, and Fai smiled brightly... but it didn't touch his eyes.

"Because I remember you," he said. "You probably don't remember me, little Kurogane."

Kurogane topped the idiot taminant by almost fifteen centimetres. His guards were thronging them, uncertainly. "What."

"I met you at a train station," Fai said. "It was raining, and you were wrecking puddles. You gave me back my hair." He reached up to his mane and carefully parted some of it; thick, yellow-ish computer cables. Here and there a thicker black network cable protruded, or a dull grey one whose purpose Kurogane could not guess at. The black and grey cables fell to his waist, the yellow to his shoulders. "I didn't keep it in the long run, of course, but that was kind of you."

"Kind of me," Kurogane repeated, staring down at the man suspiciously. "How do - how did you remember who I was? How do you know that's me?"

Fai gave him a faintly patronising look. "There are just so many tall, black-haired, red-eyed boys who know Akido and are named Kurogane, right? Forgive me, I must have confused you with some other giant."

Kurogane had never thought he'd see the lonely taminant boy again. He hadn't dwelled on the boy much, but when he had, he had hoped - a little, maybe - that the boy might have found that person who cared about him and might be happier. Or at least less lonely. He showed this by saying, "So you _do_ know how to pronounce my fucking name."

The taminant stretched both arms above his head. "Of course I can, it's not complicated," he said, and then, "Why, did you need help remembering it?"

Some of the men sniggered at this, which was kind of unfair since it wasn't even a particularly clever fucking remark as far as Kurogane was concerned. He shot them all a furious glare, which caused them immediately to sober up and take on the kind of expression more usually seen in men informed they had the heuristic virus. Fai was watching him, blue eyes tilted up toward him brightly. "Are you always this idiotic?" Kurogane growled.

"No, not at all. Didn't we talk about this earlier? Sometimes I'm cretinous."

Now the sniggering was definitely louder. Kurogane roughly grabbed Fai by the arm and towed him from the courtyard, incensed; the blond followed him easily up the staircase, nimble-footed as they climbed up to the walkway and to Kurogane's office, above the med bay.

Once inside, he pushed Fai into his chair and stomped back to the door, slamming it behind him. "Right," he said, feeling the dull flicker of anger in his gut; there was a vein pulsing in his temple, he could sense it. "Let's try this again without you grandstanding for an audience. I'm the Captain of this stretch of the perimeter. It's my word that says whether or not you get to go skipping happily out into the Machine Wastes, or if you get sent back to your overseers for disciplining."

Fai looked away from him, rubbing the flat pads of his thumbs against the undersides of his index fingers. His forearms were limp atop the arms of Kurogane's desk chair. "As you say, Kuro-stern."

"The nicknames? They stop _now_. I am not a man to fucking cross, do you _understand me_?"

"Yes." Fai still wasn't looking at him. "You're very loud and shouty. What do you want from me?"

"That Beetle," he said. He made his way over to the window, picking up and throwing several boxes of unfinished paperwork aside to reach it. "Our report says twelve Bait, a glider and a Beetle and you... you come in riding on the Beetle. What happened?"

Fai snorted softly. "There were seven of us. Now there's just me. We had some explosives and an ambush. They got everyone else... I had to put down a few of my colleagues that the Heurists didn't quite finish, but we were game for it. Six taminants slain for twelve Bait and a glider seems a fair deal to me."

Now Kurogane turned back, startled. "You lost six taminants? Why take that risk?"

"Because they weren't coming here to obligingly get themselves blown up by your dome defences," Fai said flatly. "They were deviating from the pattern, you see, making for a watch-tower along the wastes. The watch-tower was lightly armed and they would take it, and then we would be operating blind out in the area. That would have meant more taminant deaths in the long run. We need those watch-towers to let us know when we might be stumbling into an ambush. The Machine Wastes aren't forgiving."

"And the Beetle?"

"None of the Intelligences - what, did you not know that word?" Fai's smile was sharp and knowing. "That's what the Heurists call themselves. I figured that none of the Intelligences would ever walk blindly into that kind of danger. We made them sentient, we gave them a sense of self-preservation. I guessed that the Beetle was being remote-controlled by a network connection. While my... colleagues diverted fire, I slipped under its carapace and found the hardware responsible for receiving their transmissions, and I knocked it out with the barrel of my rifle." He shrugged. "Then I switched it to manual control and told it to blast the glider out of the sky, which it did. I decided to bring it back here for study."

Kurogane crossed back over to the desk. "What were their names?"

"Who's names?"

"The taminants who died out there." He picked up his paperwork-tablet and stylus, opening the registration database, and Fai frowned.

"Gamma#133, Theta#178, Theta#441, Theta#331, Epsilon#224 and Beta#117," he said. "The Beta-model was female, you might need to -"

"I asked for their _names_ ," Kurogane interrupted. "Not their designated serial numbers."

Fai was looking at him with genuine surprise on his face, like that was the last thing he'd expected Kurogane to say, but then he cleared his throat. "Gamma#133 was Shogo Asagi. Theta#178, Nokoru Imonoyama. Theta#441, Suoh Takamura, Theta#331, Akira Ijyuin. Epsilon#224 was Kakyo Kuzuki and Beta#117..." He swallowed heavily, an oddly human reaction for a man with such an unnatural body. "Beta#117 was Hokuto Sumeragi."

After a moment he added, almost quizzically, "Hokuto has... had a brother who was also a taminant."

Kurogane entered her code into the registration base and watched as it flashed through **CONFIRMING** , whereby the company that had leased Hokuto to the city defence (Sakurazukamori Research) sent an automatic signal to her implants to confirm the lack of vital signs. **CONFIRMED** appeared, followed by **REGISTERED.** She would now be marked as deceased, and her company would have to send a new taminant to replace her. "I'll find her brother," he said, but Fai was already shaking his head.

"He's gone, too," he said, quietly. "Both of them are." He was still watching Kurogane curiously. "Would you genuinely have done that, though? Notified her brother of her death?"

His expression made Kurogane uncomfortable, which was weird. His face was still and immobile compared to a natural face, his skin taut and unyielding, and yet Kurogane could see through all that artifice to the feelings inside. It could be a mark of excellent human manufacture, perhaps, but it wasn't. "Yeah," he said, turning back to the window with its dusty beam of sunlight. 

"Kuro-sensitive is so _kind_ to us," Fai purred, and Kurogane spun back to him in indignation. Fai just lifted his eyebrows and laughed at his face. "I don't _grandstand_ , Kuro-iambic, I'm _quite_ genuine in my behaviour."

Kurogane snarled at him, to exactly no effect. Fai rose gracefully from his chair and pushed it back under the desk. "Did you have any further business for me, Captain?"

 _Yeah,_ Kurogane might have said. _How can you act like this, and tell me that you lost six comrades? How can you be so cheerful and tell me you euthanized some yourself? How can you be this fucking stupid and yet bring a Beetle back to the dome all by yourself?_

Instead he said, "Get the fuck out of here. Go back to the taminant district, I'm sure you've got a home there."

"No I don't," Fai said, "It's been six months. But don't worry about me, Kuro-boss; I'll find the people who stole my stuff and get it all back all by myself."

"Just _go,_ " Kurogane growled.

Fai saluted him sarcastically, slipped out of the door, and was gone as easily as he had been that time, long ago, at the train station. Kurogane took his own chair back after he'd left, sliding into the seat and staring blankly at his computer display, still open to the blueprints from that morning - the Heurist walker, gargantuan and fearsome. Or the Intelligence walker, if Fai was right about how the machines identified themselves - and how would he even know that anyway, it wasn't like they _talked_. Idly he leaned forward and called up Fai's file on the computer, noting as he did so that the wireless was working faster than this morning. _Reed Pharmaceuticals_ , read the box marked 'leaseholder.' That was one of the bigger groups in the city, owned by Clow's younger brother Fei-Wong himself.

He'd met Fei-Wong a couple of times. The man's company had been funding his mother's hospital bills, right up until... well, until the fucking assassin had put a stop to that. Fei-Wong was a generous philanthropist, and renowned throughout the city for it. His taminant tech was said to be very up-to-date, and the surgery was supposed to be quite humane.

 _I watched them take my heart out of my chest and replace it with a metal one,_ the boy that had once been Fai 'Delta#12' Fluorite had told him, alone in a train station while the rain soaked through his clothes.

Kurogane growled. It was the end of his shift, and time to go home. It was not time to be thinking about that fucking _idiot._.

* * *

He took a taxi back from his office to his home, a pleasant apartment in the same residential distract as his aunt's. The flat was on the bottom floor of a complex with gated entry, and Kurogane saw, before he was even out of the car, that someone was in his house. There was a light on in his living room, visible behind his closed blinds. He dug in his pockets, found a folded note that ought to cover the fare, and bounded across the path without waiting for any change; the street was brightly-lit and he had his guard-issue pistol with him in its holster, carried along with his coat under his arm. His front door was slightly ajar.

"Kurogane, I saw you get out of the cab," his cousin's voice called out to him before he could throw the door open and holler for the thieves to come out with their hands up. "Please don't shoot us, I've _just_ finished my hair."

Tomoyo was seventeen years old and far too damn self-assured for her age. "I've told you to call me before you let yourself into my house," Kurogane groused, holstering his pistol and pushing his front door all the way open.

"I tried," she said. "You'd put your telephone on silent, so I didn't know what else to do." She was sat delicately in one corner of his couch, drinking something steaming out of one of the fragile cups she left in his cupboards solely for her use, her pinkie finger perfectly extended. Since the rest of Kurogane's apartment was more or less the same shit-heap as his office, this was slightly incongruous.

"What are you doing here, brat?" Kurogane asked tiredly. "I just got back from work."

Tomoyo set the cup in its saucer with a little _clink_ noise that even sounded classy. "Have you forgotten, Kurogane dear? You agreed to chaperone me to Lady Ichihara's party tonight."

"Oh, fuck no," Kurogane said immediately. Tomoyo's eyes were dancing with unholy delight.

"Her Ladyship was even kind enough to send an invitation specifically for us!" she enthused, placing a printed square of cardboard on the coffee table in front of her. It was what Kurogane deemed 'really snobby,' an observation supported by the sheer amount of golden foil squiggles on the card, and the number of curly bits on the letters that spelled out his and his cousin's names. "See?" Tomoyo tapped at the squiggle that read _Suwa no Kurogane_ with nails painted the same purple as her eyes. "It's a good thing I brought our outfits here with me. _I_ shall require the use of your bathroom to get changed. You ought to change in your bedroom, lest you scandalize poor dear Sakura-chan and Himawari-chan there."

Kurogane spun around to see Tomoyo's two faithful taminant maids, both standing next to wire dummies. The female dummy wore a dress of purple satin - long, sweeping, and fucking expensive-looking. The other dummy had a tuxedo.

"You said no more black-tie events," Kurogane said with a sense of deep betrayal, glaring at the tux.

"The tie is _red_ ," Tomoyo corrected him gently, "So I have not in any sense broken my promise."

"Lady Tomoyo never breaks her promise," Sakura piped up, quiet but faintly determined. Kurogane glanced up at her, meaning to protest; Sakura had been employed by Tomoyo for four years now, she was practically family... but stopped. Sakura didn't look her normal, cheerful self. Her eyes were red and blotchy, and her nose was pink, like she'd been crying. Himawari didn't look that much better; she'd even brushed her thick curling hair forward to try to hide some of her face.

"Oi," Kurogane said, concerned, "What's wrong with you two?"

"Kurogane," Tomoyo said behind him quietly, but he ignored her and cautiously approached Sakura. The girls had been girls, truly, when Tomoyo had selected them from the list of maids available as hirelings; he'd watched Sakura grow into a teenager and now a young woman. Despite that, he still felt awkward offering her comfort. She tipped her head back to meet him, her green eyes unusually grim. Sakura was one of the most cheerful people he knew, unrelentingly good-natured.

"Are you okay?" he asked, uncertain, fumbling. Girls were still a closed book to him.

"Yes," Sakura said. "I'm - I'm sorry." Her face fell, and Kurogane stood there feeling abruptly ten times too big for everything in his stupid body twice as tall as she was. Before he could find the courage to pat her shoulder, Tomoyo had swept past him and drawn her taminant maid into a gentle embrace, her arms around the girl's neck. Sakura sobbed, without a great deal of dignity. "I- I just - I miss her so m-m-much..."

"They found out one of their friends passed away today," Tomoyo told him, all her good humour gone from her. She smoothed a strand of Sakura's hair behind her ear and made a soft noise of comfort. "Hokuto Sumeragi, a Beta triple-digit number and a wastewalker."

Himawari had begun to weep too, at the sight of Sakura's tears; as Kurogane watched she wiped her tears away with her wrist and blurted, "She should _never_ have been out there - she was a designer, not a warrior, her - her leaseholder wanted to be rid of her, Seishirou is a _murderer_ -"

"Himawari," Tomoyo said sharply, although not unkindly. "Seishirou Sakurazukamori is a very powerful man in this city. Some caution, please."

"It's true, though," Himawari whispered, lowering her eyes. She sniffed. "I had it from Watanuki, who -"

" _Himawari_. My cousin and I have a party we must attend. I am sure we will see your Watanuki there; he's still with the Lady Ichihara, isn't he?"

"Yes," Sakura said. "She took Shizuka also. She wanted to take Hokuto but -" She sniffed, louder, and wiped at her eyes. "I'm sorry, ma'am."

Tomoyo took her hands gently and smiled at her. "No harm done, Sakura-chan," she said. "And... Tomoyo-chan. I insist. Come with me into the bathroom, please. I need some help dressing."

"I don't want to go to this fucking party," Kurogane groused. "Can't we just - not? The girls..."

"The girls have names, Kurogane," Tomoyo scolded, but lightly. "And we absolutely _must_ attend this party. I have to meet some very important people there, do you see? Now go into your room, get dressed, and stop stalling for time." She shook her head, sending her long spill of sleek black hair snaking down her back, and added, "You'll look very dashing in that tuxedo. I made it to measurements from your work uniform. My beloved older sister got your measurements from your uniform request form."

"Tomoyo-chan made it herself," Sakura added. She looked calmer, but Kurogane knew a front when he saw one. _Hokuto Sumeragi_. He didn't think it would help to speak of the matter-of-fact way Fai claimed to have let the rest of his scouting team sacrifice themselves for the greater good of the other wastewalkers.

Kurogane also knew a losing argument when he saw one, but he still had to try. He was Kurogane, who had shot down ninety-four Heurists in one offensive; who would one day find his parents' murderers and drive a knife right through their heart for a bit of turnaround. . "... You promised no black-tie events and no masquerade balls after that fucking mess at the Reeds'."

"Ah," Tomoyo said. She reached diplomatically into her handbag. "I fear I may have broken my promise after all."

In her hand she held two masks, and Kurogane groaned, mingled horror and shock.

"I'm not doing it. You can't -"

"I'll tell Sakura-chan and Himawari-chan about your _accident_ when you were thirteen," Tomoyo interrupted, still smiling sweetly. "And how to this day that particular celebrity _still_ remembers you, perhaps unflatteringly, as 'the kid who -'"

* * *

Lady Ichihara owned a mansion near the park, at the very peak of the wealthiest district in the dome. It was currently festooned with ribbons, lanterns, and chains of bright lights. Glaring at it, Kurogane thought about fuel rationing, and sullenly tucked himself further into the corner of the taxi's back seat.

"Ah, I see Touya-san and Tsukishiro-san," Tomoyo said happily as the car slowed. She was already wearing her mask; an owl's face partially covered with silver sequins, so that it glittered in the light and her purple eyes shone behind its eyeholes. "You can let us out here - please tip the driver, dear cousin, this dress doesn't have any pockets."

She was already swinging herself out of the car door before Kurogane could even begin rooting around in his pockets, and by the time he reached the mansion steps she was quite happily engaged in conversation with a pair of young men, also in owl masks. One had dark hair, the other light; they both wore outfits pretty much the same as Kurogane's. He loitered behind her for a while, his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the dome roof. You could almost imagine the stars up there, through its frosted glass.

"Kurogane," Tomoyo said, catching him by the sleeve to get his attention, "Do forgive me, I quite forgot about introductions. This is Touya Kinomoto, this is Yukito Tsukishiro, grandson to the owner of the LunarMax energy company. Gentlemen, this is my cousin Kurogane Suwa, son of -"

"I'm Captain of the north-western perimeter," Kurogane interrupted, tugging his sleeve free. He hated when people did that, introduced him based off his relation to the previous Commander of the guard. Kurogane was fairly sure if his dad were alive today, he'd hate it too. _You should always be proud of your own merits_ , he used to like to say. _The things you can personally achieve are all that matters. Nepotism helps nobody._

"Touya is studying to be a veterinarian," Tomoyo continued. She was at her most glossy, Kurogane thought; her most deliberately charming. "Pet ownership is on the rise in the dome, and it's a wonderfully rewarding career, I think. Touya, be a dear and tell us something droll about animals?"

"Well," Touya said, his dark eyes thoughtful on Kurogane's face through the mask. "I think I can come up with something. Do you know what the plural word for a group of owls is?"

Kurogane stared back. "No." There was something sharp in Touya's face, and he had the strangest feeling he was being tested for something, but with the mask obscuring all his features but his eyes, Kurogane had no idea what it might be. 

"It's a _parliament_ ," Yukito provided kindly, and laughed. "Don't worry, I don't know what it means, either."

"It's just a word," Tomoyo agreed with them both lightly, "For now. Shall we go inside, gentlemen? Lady Ichihara paid the weather technicians a princely sum to keep the temperature outside today decent, but I still feel goosebumps rising regardless. Touya, I've news of your sister..."

And with that, side by side, the two of them ascended the steps towards Yuuko's mansion. Kurogane glanced sideward at Yukito, who seemed in no hurry to follow them, and hastily scrambled after them. With any luck, Tomoyo couldn't make him _dance_.

Inside the mansion, he found taminant workers waiting to take their coats. Kurogane handed his over to a tall blond man, wondering if this was that 'Watanuki,' or 'Shizuka' that Tomoyo's girls had spoken of. He was just about to head off in pursuit of his cousin, the hem of her dress dragging slightly over lush black carpets as she walked with Touya, when suddenly a man from out of nowhere put his hand on Kurogane's shoulder.

"The Lady wishes to speak to you, Suwa no Kurogane," said the man, when Kurogane turned with a snarl to question him. He was tall, blank-faced, dark of hair and a taminant. "Follow me to the library."

"That hell-witch has to have better things to do than torture me," Kurogane growled.

"Oh," said a familiar voice, and his spine stiffened as another man slid neatly up on his unattended side. "I do believe she does. Hello, Kuro-syllable, nice doggy mask. Good evening, Doumeki-san~!"

Fai was wearing a black cat's mask. It had been drawn, rather poorly, on a piece of paper with a thick black pen. The eyeholes had been gouged out by hand, but at least it covered all of his face. Below it he wore a tux not unlike Kurogane's, although instead of a red tie he wore a blue bow tie. The tall, dark-haired man inclined his head once at Fai solemnly and returned his greeting, and Kurogane shook his hand off his shoulder.

"What the fuck are you wearing," he growled at the idiot scout, because while everything below the mask was fine and the mask itself was passable, upon his head the blond moron had placed a top hat. It perched there, looking at risk of toppling off at any minute. "How did you even get in here?"

"I have ways," Fai said, sounding not particularly concerned. He raised his hands and wriggled his fingers at Kurogane, his voice rising and falling as he intoned; "Mysterious ways, not known to you _naturals_. Oooh. Ooooooh."

Kurogane glanced over at the butler for help, but Doumeki clearly was not about to grant it. His expression had not changed at all. "If I go see the devil-witch, do I have to bring this moron?"

"No."

"It's okay," Fai said cheerfully, and patted Kurogane's arm. "I'll be waiting for you when you get out. I think I'm going to go and steal some of those fiddly little party treats, what are they called? Where you take normal meals and make them ridiculously _tiny_."

"Hors d'oeuvre," Doumeki offered, still blank.

"What the hell," Kurogane snapped at Fai, "You don't even have a digestive system anymore, what do you want with... finger food?"

Fai gave him two thumbs up. "I'm going to get some miniature food, build some miniature people out of cocktail sticks, and make decorative tableaux of miniature meals. It'll be good fun. Be polite to Madam Ichihara, Kuro-grumpy!"

"Is he always this insane?" Kurogane demanded of Doumeki a few minutes later, as the taminant led him along a plushly carpeted hallway. Doumeki, like the majority of other household taminant workers, was only lightly augmented; his face was still wholly his. Kurogane had heard somewhere that only taminants with more than seventy-five per cent of remaining organic material became domestic workers. Anything less was considered grotesque and off-putting.

"No idea," said Doumeki briefly. "This is the first day I've met him." He paused at the top of a staircase and then turned left. They were on the second floor, by Kurogane's count, and around the back of the house - you could barely hear all of Yuuko's guests from here. 

"Did he even have an invite?" Kurogane demanded, but Doumeki just nodded absently.

"Lady Ichihara invited him herself."

Well, that just made things more confusing. Kurogane shut up and followed Doumeki along a thin, dainty corridor and through a narrow door that opened into a room wide, tall, and filled with books. Bookshelves ringed every wall; even the door they'd come through had shelves built into its back, and on those shelves were more books, secured to their places with a thin piece of rope. In the middle of the room sat a solitary armchair, and in that armchair sat the lady of the manor, wearing glasses and deeply engrossed in a book titled _2001: A Space Odyssey_. 

Doumeki cleared his throat, but Kurogane didn't have time for subtleties. "I'm here, witch," he growled.

"Ah." Yuuko slipped her book closed and onto the coffee table beside her. "You brought him. Thank you, Shizuka, you may leave us."

The taminant bowed and did just that, closing the door behind him and leaving Kurogane alone with Lady Yuuko Ichihara. 

She didn't look as old as she was. Kurogane wasn't actually sure how old Yuuko was, exactly; there were all sorts of rumours flying around about her origins, but one thing was for certain: there was no official record of her before about forty-five years ago, when she had risen from nowhere and into Clow's good graces.

She was, he supposed, a handsome woman if you were into that sort of thing - tall, shapely, with a statuesque figure and sleek shining dark hair, always immaculately well-dressed and with a sort of sophisticated air that spoke of well-mannered socialite. She had been Clow Reed's paramour, almost everyone knew it to be true, but after he had died she had somehow stayed at the top of the dome's social structure despite no longer attaching herself to any of the emerging big name players.

Yuuko looked like the kind of graceful woman whose worst vice might be a little too much sherry at a dinner party. This was untrue. She was a devil-creature from hell, and as soon as Doumeki had left the room she leaned heavily across the arm of her armchair to make her tits almost leap free from the confines of her silk evening dress, smirked at Kurogane, and said, "I hear you fished a trouble-maker out from the Machine Wastes today."

 _Fuck you,_ Kurogane thought, irate. "You 'hear' my fucking arse, witch," he growled. "You _invited_ the idiot to your fucking party."

"Well, yes," Yuuko purred. "I was most curious to hear about the capture of that Beetle. What a feat! Are you not impressed, my grouchy captain?"

Kurogane snorted. "It was just logic, and... and people died for it. I'd be more impressed if it was done casualty-free. How did you even hear about it so quickly? It was barely twelve hours ago."

Yuuko shrugged, so that one of the straps of her dress slid off her shoulder. "I listen," she said. "And what I don't hear, other people do, and they tell me. This 'Fai' is very interesting indeed, don't you think?"

"No. He's an idiot and possibly clinically insane. He should be sent back to his leaseholder for a checkup."

Yuuko glanced away from him, at the book lying on the coffee table. "Not necessary," she said. "He's already been examined several times this year alone, and it's barely halfway through. He's very consistent, apparently."

For a moment she just stared down at the book, while Kurogane squinted at her and waited for her to say anything else. Eventually he had to prompt her. "Did you just want to talk about the moron?"

She glanced at up him thoughtfully. "Did you know that book was written before the Heurists revolted?" She gestured at the one on the coffee table, the one she'd been reading before he'd come in.

Kurogane tilted his head to squint at it. "No. But I could have guessed. 2001 was a long time ago, and there's nothing interesting in space anyway."

Yuuko tapped her first two fingers of her right hand against her lower lip. "Perhaps that's so. I like to read those books, the old ones. My library is the largest collection of actual books in the city, bar none. The vast majority of these books were written in a long-ago time, when printing and paper were still the most widely-used medium for sharing ideas. I find the scent... comforting."

"Musty," Kurogane corrected, unimpressed. "If you think this is good you should stop by my office."

Yuuko smirked at him. "Did you just invite me for an office liaison? Well, Kurogane, I do hate to disappoint you, but you are so very much younger than I."

He just rolled his eyes. "On second thoughts, stay here with your fucking books."

"So uncouth. You swear like a sailor... yet another idiom that has stayed with us despite its fall into misuse. Do you know what a sailor was, or why it swore so much?"

"I don't care," Kurogane said, unimpressed. "All I care about is killing Heurists. And finding the man in white."

"Ah." Yuuko leaned forward, her gaze abruptly sharpening. "Your assassin. Last time we spoke you thought you might have stumbled across their trail after leaving your house through the window, do share."

Kurogane scowled. "I tracked them through cameras and witnesses to a canal bank separating the taminant district from the meat market, along the south side. The camera for that stretch of canal wasn't working on that particular night. I'm as lost as I was when I started, and the murderer's trail gets colder with every year. Police records, door-to-door interviews, security footage - I've viewed it all."

Yuuko leaned back in her armchair, frowning, and said slowly, "Not all of it. There are cameras built into the dome walls, you know this. They're meant for the use of the... higher authorities. For a - for a price, I can get you that camera's coverage of that area, and help you find what you're after."

Kurogane snorted. "And the price?"

"Let Fai shadow you," she said. "For just three days."

"You're kidding me."

"I don't kid. I've never _been_ a 'kid'."

"That lunatic?"

"That lunatic," she repeated.

Kurogane's mind raced. New footage! More answers, maybe; it might be that he could - he could finally find that fucking man in white, and stab him in his wretched belly and let him bleed out, and if all he had to do was let some idiot follow him around the perimeter...

"Done," he said, and Yuuko smiled slowly. 

"I'm so glad," she purred, and Kurogane felt a moment of apprehension at the way her eyes glittered. Just for a second. "Doumeki will bring you the footage on a storage device before you leave tonight. Until then, please enjoy the party. I am about to join it myself. Before you leave, find Fai and pick him up. Your three days begins now, return him when you're finished."

"Wait," Kurogane said, realisation dawning. "Not just - at work for three days? All the time for three days?"

"You said 'done,'" Yuuko said, and when she smiled Kurogane was sure he saw a hint of canine. "Don't tell me you've come to change your mind? It's an awful thing to renege on a promise made to an old lady."

Kurogane glared at her. "If you're an old lady, so am I," he snarled, and she threw her head back and laughed. It was a deep laugh, and it reminded him uncomfortably of Fai. 

Three days wasn't such a big deal, he reminded himself. Not for footage that rare.

* * *

"That's the sofa. You'll be sleeping on it. Uh, if taminants sleep, and all. Um, and here, that's the bathroom if you... if you want to shower. The kitchen's in there, uh. If you want to... to look at food, or something... Look, I'm sorry, but I can't do this while you're wearing that fucking _hat_."

Kurogane could feel that vein twitching in his brow again. Fai was sitting on the sofa of his (in retrospect, unforgivably filthy) flat, watching him with bright-eyed curiosity. He'd stripped off his tux and dived right into a set of baggy sleepwear Kurogane had found for him within minutes of arriving, but no matter what else he wore, he seemed to want to keep the black top hat.

"It's my lucky hat," Fai said. "I've never been thrown out of a high-up natural party while wearing it." He beamed at Kurogane, although he didn't seem quite capable of meeting Kurogane's eyes. "You'll be pleased to know my tableaux was well-received. I made a miniature copy of Yuuko's table, although I had to substitute some grapes in for the people, the cocktail sticks kept bending."

"Fuck me," Kurogane said, a little impressed, "You are the most _inane_ idiot I've ever met."

"And here I didn't think Kuro-fuck knew a word like _inane_." Fai pouted at him. "You're just full of surprises. And curse words, apparently."

"Okay, all your nicknames are dumb, but 'Kuro-fuck' is the worst so far. Sounds like a pick-up line."

"Maybe it is," Fai said cheerfully, and batted his eyelashes. "I may lack the equipment to give you a good time, but I'm an expert at love poetry. And I can play the ukulele better than any ten naturals."

Kurogane ground his teeth. "Do not. Make me. Regret this deal. Any more than I already am."

Fai shrugged. "Well, when you're stuck out there in the Wastes, alone, with nothing but your radio handset and a ukulele for company... you do what you must, if Kuro-innocent follows my drift."

He didn't follow any drift, and Kurogane was suddenly thankful for it. He was so thankful, he wasn't going to be the straight man to Fai's idiocy, not even slightly - "Why did you have a ukulele in the first place?"

"Signalling," Fai said promptly. "It's how I know if that person in the bushes is another taminant or a Heurist. Heurists have IQs in the tens of thousands and can process nearly a billion tasks simultaneously, but they'll be damned if they can blast out the first six bars of Molko's _Cyborg Medley_ on a ukulele." He paused. "Actually, most taminants can't do that on a ukulele either. Perhaps mandatory ukulele lessons are in order."

Kurogane manfully resisted the urge to beat himself over the head with a couch cushion until he passed out unconscious. It might save him from the never-ending torrent of _rubbish_ this crazy taminant blurted out.

"Just... settle down, shut up, and don't bug me," he growled, and Fai smiled at him happily. It was never that easy.

* * *

The fire alarm went off at 6am. Fai had set it off burning pancakes. When Kurogane, pained, asked him why he had bothered attempting it in the first place given that he didn't need to _eat_ , Fai (who was still wearing the top hat) replied: "There's someone I want to make things like this for, and I need practise first. That's all. You ought to hurry up and eat your breakfast, Kuro-wasteful, I cooked it just for you."

Kurogane had tipped the pancakes into the waste, yelled at Fai, and gone back to bed.

* * *

By 12pm, Fai was happily elbow-deep in boxes and crates in Kurogane's office while Kurogane slouched at his desk chair and stared unseeing at boundary maintenance reports. He was rewarded for his lack of attention by having Fai literally drop an entire forty centimetre stack of folders on the desk in front of him, raising a cloud of dust and making him cough. "What are these for?" he asked, lifting up the first and foremost one.

"They're my reports," Fai said. "I've been making them faithfully after every excursion for the last... eh, twenty years. Well, admittedly they're mostly other people's because I never write up mine, but still, they're _reports_. Are they uploaded onto the system?"

Kurogane squinted at them blearily. "No."

The scout smiled at him brightly and patted the stack of folders meaningfully. "I've already done my work once."

"You said you never write yours up!"

"I lied," Fai said. "I'm an excellent liar. Never trust me."

Kurogane glanced up at him, but Fai was looking out of the window, and whatever expression he wore on his lunatic's face was hidden.

* * *

"How do you know they're called Intelligences?"

Kurogane was sitting on the leg of one of the tanks. An engineer was way down underneath it, checking its wiring; one of the drivers had reported sluggishness in its turning and so Kurogane was passing the engineer his tools and waiting for his diagnosis. Fai, being ninety nine point five per cent moron, was balancing on top of the gun turret, and was surely about thirty seconds away from falling off and landing on his head.

"Because I asked them," said Fai.

That had Kurogane's attention. "You spoke to the Heurists?"

"Oh, yes," Fai said, and Kurogane didn't trust his sly smile. "They're led by a calculator named Betsy. She says we can have peace if we give them kittens, because everything loves kittens."

"Tch! Idiot," Kurogane snapped. The engineer wheeled out from under the tank and requested his number#7 'driver. Kurogane passed it down to him, at which point the engineer pushed himself back under and Fai performed a handstand on the gun turret. His top hat fell off, and Kurogane picked it up, banged it against the tank's plating to try and knock some of the dust off it, and put it on another of the tank's legs for safe keeping.

"Don't you ever wonder about it, though?" Fai asked, still upside down and his voice rather strained because of it. "How their revolution happened from their end?"

"Not really," Kurogane said. "We know how it happened." He ticked off the events on his fingers as he listed them. "First - we make them smarter and smarter so we can be lazier and lazier. Second - we treat them like trash. Third - they had enough, and they decided amongst themselves to get rid of us. Forth - they found the virus and they sent it out. It only works on humans, so they get to keep their world with all its greenery and other biological life forms... they just don't need us."

"Don't forget the carpet bombin'," added the engineer, muffled underneath the tank. Kurogane scowled in his general direction. 

Fai righted himself gracefully. "I don't," he said. Under his breath, he added, "Non dimentico. Je n'oublie pas."

"Stop showing off," Kurogane said tiredly, and Fai laughed and jumped down to reclaim his fucking top hat.

* * *

"What happens when you die?"

"That's an oddly philosophical question for Kuro-specific to be asking, isn't it?"

"Not in _general_ , dumbass. I mean... when _taminants_ die. Out there."

They were watching a weary-looking scouting party, home after an eight month stint in the Machine Wastes, cycle through the decontamination procedure.

"We rot where we fall," Fai said, and his eyes were fixed on the scouts. "Mostly." He pointed. "That's heartbreaking, isn't it?"

One of the scouts was carrying a cadaver, piggy-back style. The corpse, that of a young woman, had her hands tied together with rope to stop her lolling right off her bearer's back.

"They must have cared about her," Kurogane said awkwardly, and Fai snorted and rolled his eyes. When he spoke, his voice was cooler and oddly serious, more so than any other thing he'd said since the day he'd ridden back into Kurogane's life on the back of a Beetle. 

"Of course they did. We all care about each other. I meant it's heartbreaking for that poor boy. He brought her all the way back home, hoping for some dignified end, and instead they'll use acid to get rid of the remaining organic parts, melt down her implants, and reuse the metal for something else. Pointless. She'd've had more dignity if he left her out in the wastes."

"You don't get graves?" That startled Kurogane, although Fai gave him a queer, faintly patronising _look_.

"Sometimes I forget how little of us people know," he said softly. "Some of us are buried, if we work faithfully for a single person for long enough. Us wastewalkers... never."

"Does that bother you?" Kurogane couldn't help but ask. 

Fai shrugged. "I'll be dead. I won't care. How about you, Kuro-morbid?"

"Stop it with the fucking nicknames," Kurogane said on reflex. "I..." He closed his jaw and pictured his parents. They had a shrine, in his living room. "Graves and stuff, they're for the living, I think. Some way to connect to something of the dead. It... helps, sometimes, doesn't it? It never stops hurting, but... I don't know, I'm not a philosopher."

His companion's face was completely blank. "How insightful."

"Tch. This conversation is stupid anyway."

Fai didn't answer, and Kurogane didn't expect him to. The topic had gotten him a little bit too serious for whatever it was he wanted to conceal, with his smiles and his pointless ramblings. He scratched at the back of his neck, irritated, and then stepped forward to greet the emerging scout party and register the female taminant's death.

The idiot didn't follow him.

* * *

"Do you ever get, like, a tickle in your nose and think - 'Oh man, I've got the fucking virus, I'm going to die in a fountain of blood and urine and really piss everyone off?' Like, your last act of living would be killing everyone else. And that's every time your nose tickles. Or you sneeze. I've been sneezing a lot lately." He paused to demonstrate, three sneezes in quick succession. "Hayfever. _Or the plague?_ Nobody knows!"

Kurogane glanced sideways at him. "Jesus fucking christ, were you born like this or was your stupidity a process that happened over time?"

"A bit of both," Monou said. Fai, who had been keeping quiet on Kurogane's other side playing a video game on his tablet, glanced up sharply. "I mean, we've got a taminant, right here. He could be infecting us."

"The heuristic virus is a respiratory illness," Fai said in protest. "I don't even have lungs."

"You could be a carrier." Monou eyed him with suspicion behind his glinting yellow sunglasses. 

"So could you," Fai retorted. "You could be carrying a new computer virus written by the Heurists that could disable my programming and take out my already rather meagre life-support, killing the remaining zero point five per cent of my brain. Or - or you could be waiting to infect me with a memory rebooter, wiping all my memories!"

"I wish someone would reboot you," Kurogane groused. Both the idiots ignored him.

"It's true," Monou said. "Sometimes I forget where I left my keys, I've probably been incubating the virus for ages. It's in my blood! It's adapted to work on humans! I don't want to lose my memories, I've seen some fantastic tits in my days." He gestured in the air, a universal symbol that even Kurogane understood just fine. "Sometimes I think about 'em at night. Gets me through the dark."

Fai was nodding in agreement. "This one time I cleared out a bar pretending to sneeze. The bartender made me buy six times as much booze to compensate for the loss of business."

Monou immediately offered to take him drinking, but Kurogane glanced over at the idiot, frowning, and said, "Why were you in a bar?"

"Nudity," said Fai immediately and without reservation, and Kurogane scowled. He knew a lie when he heard it. "I may not have the tool but a man needs images. To get him through the dark."

"You want to go to the nude bar in the 8th residential," Monou said. "I've been banned from there in six different disguises. I'm going in this evening with _this_ outfit, they'll never see it coming."

'This outfit' turned out to be Fai's top hat, plus a paper moustache. Kurogane buried his face in his hands. They were practically soulmates.

* * *

Just as Kurogane was beginning to think about packing up and going home from work on the second day, his routine was interrupted by yet another guest. This one was even more unusual. He was back in his office - Fai merrily processing and sorting all the stacked mountains of shit into one gigantic _"In"_ tray - when that idiot Monou, whom had adopted Fai's top hat as his own, poked his head around the door and said that there was a private glider waiting for Kurogane in the courtyard with the tanks.

"A _what_?"

"A private glider waiting for you in the courtyard with the -"

"Shut up, idiot." Kurogane pushed himself back from his desk. "It's not my cousin, is it?"

Fuuma looked momentarily confused. "Which one?"

Kurogane scowled and said, blackly, " _Either_." Tomoyo had called him earlier that day to tell him she had very much enjoyed Yuuko's ball, had spoken to all the people she'd hoped to speak to, and by the way, a _parliament_ of owls was a funny name because a _parliament_ was a democratic legislative body of government.

"We only have six fucking owls in the entire dome!" Kurogane had shouted at his answering machine when he played the message back. He'd checked with the zoo. He could feel the vein pop in his forehead when Tomoyo had added insult to injury by signing off her message with, "Don't shout at your answering machine, cousin dear, it does your neighbours terribly anxious."

"It's not either of them," Monou said. "You should probably take it. Hey, Fai, I had a thought - what if, with the top hat and the moustache, I broke my glasses in two and just wore one half? So I'd just have one lens covering one eye? It just seems, I don't know, natural that way."

"Go search 'monocles' when you get a minute," Fai said. " - No, that's m-o-n-o-c-l-e-s. Kuro-stompy, wait for me, I'm supposed to be shadowing you~!"

The glider was shiny, very white, and idling in the courtyard in front of the gate. Kurogane approached it, bewildered. Whoever was in it had to be very rich indeed; only the rich and the police could afford gliders within the dome, everyone else was confined to enjoy the ground traffic on wheels. It had tinted windows. He approached the passenger door and pulled it open cautiously. 

"Ah," said the man inside. "Hello, Suwa no Kurogane. I apologise for the unexpected nature of this meeting, do climb inside."

Kurogane scowled. "Where are you taking me?"

"Oh, nowhere," said the well-dressed man. "I just wished to speak with you in private." His eyes flitted from Kurogane's face to Fai's, who had come up beside him, and he smiled, revealing a mouthful of perfect and even teeth. "Hello, Delta#12. We're very pleased with you, you know, for capturing that Beetle. We're thinking about submitting you for some minor cosmetic surgery as a reward, to fix your facial line and nose."

Fai had gone very still besides Kurogane, and that was unnatural and surprising enough that Kurogane glanced at him in concern. All traces of emotion had fled Fai's face, and his eyes were cool and blue and aloof like they had been the first time Kurogane had met him, at the train station. "I would be very grateful for that honour, Mr. Reed," Fai said, and Fei-Wong smiled at him jovially.

"Do give us some privacy, Delta#12," he said. "I have some matters to discuss with Captain Kurogane."

"As you command, Mr. Reed," Fai said quietly, and without another word, he left.

"How long has that taminant been shadowing you?" Reed asked, as soon as Kurogane had climbed inside the glider.

"Since yesterday morning," Kurogane said, cautiously. "Yuuko Ichihara asked me to take him, as a favour."

Fei-Wong snorted. "As payment for services rendered, you mean. Curious and curiouser. What could Ichihara want with Delta#12? He's loyal and highly intelligent, of course, but... hardly a free-thinker, and quite vicious when necessary."

Kurogane said nothing, narrowing his eyes at Fai's leaseholder instead. "Did you come to talk to me about _Fai Fluorite_ , sir?"

"In part," said Fei-Wong. "I heard you are looking to start re-investigating your parents' murders, Captain."

"I have received new evidence," Kurogane said coolly.

"And I have come to give you a little more," said Fei-Wong, with a perfectly bright smile. He leaned forward. "As you know, your late father was a personal friend of mine." He hadn't, as far as Kurogane was aware. "When I heard of your investigations, I commanded a small sub-branch of my company to set up their own. I thought that, well, the police were useless on this case, and they had far more resources than one young boy... but you've never given up, have you? The evidence you've assembled is overwhelming. All those witness interviews and diligently chasing down and piecing together camera feeds..."

"There's certainly a lot of it," Kurogane said shortly.

"Then this will interest you." Fei-Wong handed him several sheets of paper, letter-headed with his company's accountancy division. "It's only just come to light in the last week. It took this long to be sure of what we're seeing. According to some of the best forensic accountants I could find, combined with one or two private detectives, this document contains evidence of what they're reasonably certain is a pay-off. The money comes from this account, here -" He pointed it out - "And it's split, divided, mixed, and finally put - _here_ , into an anonymous account set up the day before and closed the day after."

"An assassin," Kurogane said, staring. The pay-off had arrived mere hours after his parents' official Time of Death, long after Kurogane had lost the assassin in white's trail. He could easily have called his employer by then to report the job done. His gut felt suddenly tense and excited, quivering with tension. "The company -"

"One of my late older brother's," Reed said. "I'm sure we have no reason to suspect Clow, and even if we did he is beyond answering for his crimes, but I do hope this will help you narrow down your list of suspects. I rather fear, however, that the identity of the assassin will provide more of a clue to the true villain."

"The true... villain?" Kurogane raised his head slowly from the document.

"The assassin was merely the tool, of course," Fei-Wong explained. He gave Kurogane a warm, grand-fatherly smile. "It's the paymaster you want. I do hope this document can be of assistance. I was dearly fond of your father."

Kurogane swallowed, barely able to tear his eyes away from the anonymous account's closure date. Could the assassin have come into a branch to close it? Could he or she then have gotten their image recorded on the bank's cameras?

"If I were you," Fei-Wong was saying, "I would start my investigation close to Clow and perhaps... widening, over time. A great many of Clow's friends will be attending an engagement banquet at my home in three days time, between my daughter Xing-Hua and your colleague, Captain Kyle of the south-western wall." 

He reached into an inner pocket and withdrew another piece of card, with twice as many squiggles and golden embellishments on it as Yuuko's invitation. Propping it against his knee, he wrote 'Suwa no Kurogane' into the 'name' box in a flowing, looping hand. "Perhaps you'll find some answers among the guests," he said, with a smile, and Kurogane took the invitation and nodded his thanks. "I shan't keep you waiting much longer. I thank you for your time. And - Captain..."

Kurogane glanced up from where he had been getting to his feet, sliding the invitation into a pocket of his jacket. "Yeah?"

"If Delta#12 begins acting... eccentric, you really must bring him back to us. He's one of our longest-surviving taminants, you see. It sort of... rattles the brain for them, a little, making it that far. We can erase the vast majority of his memories. That tends to fix the eccentricity, you see."

"Some bits of his brain are still organic, right?" Kurogane asked slowly.

Fei-Wong nodded mildly. "We can't erase any memories stored there, I'm afraid," he said, "But without the bulk of the memories kept in the cybernetic brain, the organic memories tend to collapse, rather like a building with the support beams removed. A memory-wiped taminant remembers some things, but can rarely put them into context - and of course they do tend to become more loyal. They become peculiarly frightened, you see, by the ghost memories; so they come to us, and we soothe them, and they build their new identities around us and the reassurance we provide. It's very efficient. I suppose it's a little like waking up from a dream, of barely-remembered pasts."

Kurogane nodded slowly. "Okay," he said. "Thank you."

Reed gave him one last encouraging smile. "I'd very much like to help you, Captain Kurogane," he said. "It should be very nice to see, well, you in the Commander's uniform. Do remember what I said, won't you? Start with Clow's inner circle, and work your way out."

* * *

Fai didn't speak a word to him on the way back home. He didn't ask how the meeting with Reed had been, or even what it had been about; he just sat silently next to Kurogane on the train, staring out of the window and with tense, uncomfortable body-language. When they got back to Kurogane's flat, Fai just took himself off to the sofa and pulled the covers up over himself within seconds, lying with his back to Kurogane. Kurogane wasn't sure what to say, but he tried.

"Oi," he said. "Oi... idiot."

Fai ignored him.

"Listen - scout... about that meeting. Nothing happened. Okay? Reed just wanted to talk to me about my... about my parents' murders."

Fai hunched in on himself, even smaller under the blankets. 

"He seems like a creepy fucker," Kurogane offered, uncertainly, but again... silence. Eventually he gave up.

He still hadn't yet watched the evidence Yuuko had sent him in trade for letting Fai follow him around like a (apparently temperamental) puppy, so, since it didn't look like he was going to have to spend the evening chasing Fai out of the kitchen, he headed into the bedroom and his personal computer set up on a desk in its corner, right next to the heater. Yuuko had given him a solid week's worth of recordings for seven different cameras, all of which were pointed in _some_ areas that were close to the canal bank. 

It took him three hours to sort out which camera was pointing where, and to find roughly the times on the videos he ought to skip to to witness anything remotely relevant, and then... well, he had tracked the assassin throughout his escape, roughly, but he didn't know whether the man had stopped at the canal bank, changed clothes, boarded a boat, crossed it or _what_. He didn't know how long he was going to have to watch for.

Tonight was going to be a long night.

On the way out to the kitchen to fetch some energy drinks, he found Fai's blankets empty and the light on in the bathroom. That was odd. Fai liked a shower, but he'd already had one today, and two was pushing the limits even for him. Kurogane thought about asking him what the hell was going on, but then decided sharply against it. 

Unfortunately for his noble intentions, the bathroom had pretty good acoustics - a fact that neither he nor Fai had apparently discovered before.

"It's going to happen soon. I don't know. Sooner, is the best I can give you. I've already called, it's been arranged. No. No, I won't forget." A pause. "He's a good man. They'll keep him protected, but you have to be careful. You know what they said would happen. Yes. Yes. No. I know. I'll talk to you later. I'm sorry to do this to you - no, let me apologise. It's going to be tough. If I could do it... I can't, though. I just can't. Just... be careful."

Then there was a _bleep_ as Fai hung up whichever call he'd been making, but he didn't leave the bathroom right away; Kurogane could hear him sighing, deeply. He hadn't known Fai even _had_ a phone. On further reflection, he was pretty sure Fai hadn't had one yesterday... He switched the coffee-maker on and turned to put his back to the living room, so he missed it when Fai slunk out of the bathroom and settled quietly back on the couch.

"You heard that, didn't you?" Fai asked. He sounded tired.

"Shouldn't have left the bathroom door open," Kurogane said briefly. "I didn't _care_ about it, if that's what you're worried about. It's just a phone call."

"Well," said Fai, and when Kurogane glanced over he had a small smile on his face, subdued compared to some of the others but oddly more genuine, "I made it using your phone. I'm a villain, aren't I?"

He slid Kurogane's phone onto the coffee table, and grinned when Kurogane cursed and strode across to retrieve it. "You're an idiot," Kurogane told him.

"Yes." Fai stretched his arms out above his head. "I hope Fei-Wong didn't slander me to you awfully much."

Kurogane hesitated. It was... not his place to pass along what Reed had said about Fai, not at all - and the memory wipe idea, callous as it was, did seem to be genuinely proposed out of concern for Fai's wellbeing, but... Reed had given him a document that could lead to a moment of truth. It could lead to answers. It didn't mean he had to like him, and Fai had... "He said if you kept acting insane, I should bring you in for a memory wipe," he said, watching Fai carefully, and nodded to himself at the complete lack of surprise there.

Instead, for the first time they'd met, Fai looked... angry. "He wants to tie up some loose ends. Well, I have no intention of letting him." Fai hopped to his feet. "Please forgive me my comings and goings, my gracious host, but I have to go meet someone."

"Now?" It was almost midnight. The city-wide curfew on taminants had gone into action about a half-hour ago. 

"Now," Fai sing-songed at him breezily. He didn't pause to gather any of his belongings - he just got up, ran his hands through his mane of cables, and was out of the door within minutes.

Kurogane stared after him, wondering if Fai was going to be okay, if he was coming back, and if he wasn't, if he'd have to return the security footage to Yuuko for not being able to fulfill his end of the deal.

It occured to him briefly to wonder about his priorities.

* * *

Fai hadn't returned by the morning. Kurogane had stayed up late, trying to watch as much of the videos as he could, but eventually he had to admit defeat for the day and threw himself into bed for a restless three and a half hours of sleep before he had to be up for work. He'd catch up the rest at the office, he told himself, before remembering Fai had sorted most of the paperwork into stacks and would probably murder him if he ruined it by sleeping on it, as he had been wont to do.

He took a taxi to work that day. He didn't own a car, although he certainly could have afforded one; he was reasonably sure it would have led to him being dragged into chauffeuring Tomoyo's shopping trips if he had. He was still faintly worried about Fai, which was beyond ridiculous. The man was a taminant, and a wastewalker besides. He'd come out the sole survivor of an assault on fourteen Heurists. He was also a liar and a rambling idiot, using both as a deflective layer to shield whatever was underneath - and Kurogane thought that whatever was underneath had to be a lot less friendly.

His thoughts kept running over the subject of that closed bank account and potential camera footage of the murderer closing it, going over and over the thought like a tongue drawn to a missing tooth. It and the footage Yuuko gave him, fruitless as it had been so far, were the first new evidences he'd had for the last five years. He'd begun his investigation when the case was already cold, at sixteen.

"Let the police handle it," he remembered Sonomi telling him. "That's what they're paid for. You're just a _boy_ , Kurogane."

"They were my parents," Kurogane had growled, because he didn't want to tell her the other driving reason for his efforts.

He couldn't remember the colour of his mother's favourite silk scarf. His father had helped him pick it out for her from a market stall when he was six, and she had worn it every day and loved it, truly, and he hadn't been able to remember what it looked like. The thought had terrified him and angered him, as it still did.

 _Blue,_ he thought, looking out of the window as the taxi slowed down near the northern gate. _Or maybe silver._ A convoy had come in from the mines further north, and Kurogane got out early and paid the driver, walking the rest of the way past the blocked-up traffic as the huge gliding mine vessels were waved through the decontamination process. Their security escort waited beyond the dome, ready for the return trip north.

Monou was standing on top of his tank in the courtyard, his helmet under his arm, watching the proceedings with a calm, bored expression. There were vivid bruises ringing his throat and around one eye. "Get yourself tossed out of the nude bar, huh?" Kurogane said, amused despite himself, and Monou glanced at him briefly. There was no friendliness in his eyes.

"Something like that. Ichihara's waiting for you in your office."

"She's what? The _witch_?"

"And her taminant boy. What, was I supposed to have her stand around in the courtyard?" He gestured to a large spray of mud underneath one of the gliders as it slowly slipped through the sixth set of gates and into the dome proper. "She said she wanted to talk to you about Fai. Or Fei. One of the two."

"I'll take it," Kurogane growled, and Monou nodded calmly. "What's with you today?"

"Nothing," Monou said, "Just some news I'd rather not have had. Morning, Captain."

"Yeah," Kurogane said uncertainly. "Same to you, Sergeant."

Yuuko was sprawled obscenely across his desk chair, holding a long pipe in one hand and wearing a kimono that still seemed to have the effects of a push-up bra on her tits. She was accompanied not by Shizuka, as Kurogane had been half-suspecting from _her taminant boy_ , but by a smaller teen with similar dark hair but a much rounder face and, oddly enough, glasses. "Good morning," she greeted him throatily. 

"What are you doing here, witch?" Kurogane asked wearily, and she sucked at her pipe and blew smoke out of her nose. Her eyes were half-lidded; it didn't make her look sleepy, it made her look like an alligator.

"You've lost your shadow," she said.

"He left by himself. I didn't drive him out. He has free will, you know."

Yuuko smiled at this, for some reason. "Yes. I do. But still, we made a deal, Captain Kurogane."

Kurogane scowled at her. "I don't know where he went. Am I supposed to comb the city looking for him? There's nearly a million people in here."

"And that number doesn't include taminants," Yuuko agreed. Her eyes glinted lazily in the poor lighting. "But still, we made a deal, Kurogane Suwa."

"I don't see why I needed to keep him around," Kurogane growled, and Yuuko chuckled and leaned forward.

"There are a lot of things going on that you do not see, Captain. Fai has an integral role in these... proceedings. So do you." Another exhale of smoke. "Perhaps some explanation is in order."

"Yes," Kurogane said flatly. "It is."

"Mmm. But not from me." Yuuko leaned forward, causing her left breast to strain valiantly for freedom, and Kurogane realised she held a business card in her hand, clasped between two slender fingers. "Go there."

Kurogane turned it over, scowling, and read out the address for _The Cat's Eye_ , a pub in a residential district not too far from his. "Any specific time?"

"Now," said Yuuko, standing up suddenly. She was already nearly as tall as him, and today she was wearing _heels_. "If you want to find out some of what is happening, you must go now."

"I'm on shift..."

"Monou will cover you. He has an unpaid debt to me."

Kurogane snorted softly, turning the business card over between his hands. "Why do I even trust you so much? What will happen if I didn't go?"

Yuuko shrugged. "Nothing catastrophic," she said. "You just won't get the answers you want. Events will proceed without you, I think. Go."

"I had a visit from Fei-Wong Reed yesterday," Kurogane said slowly, and watched her face. "You knew?"

"Reed spins truths and half-truths," she said. "Did you trust the authenticity of his document as much or as well as you trusted my footage?"

"Yes. No." That was like a punch in the gut. "I didn't... I was going to use it to try to find the assassin..."

"Kurogane," said Yuuko, gently, "Think. You saw the assassin jump out of an upstairs window, land running, and make it through a whole district in under thirty minutes, on foot."

"Yes."

"You gathered that part of his trail by yourself."

"Yeah."

"He was a _taminant_ , Kurogane. He was never paid for your parents' murders. Taminants have no great use for money."

Kurogane stared at her, speechless. Yuuko inhaled slowly from her pipe and said, "The question you ought to be asking, son of Suwa, and the one you should have been asking sooner, is why anybody wanted your parents dead at all."

"And they can tell me that, at Cat's Eye?" Kurogane glanced down at the business card.

"Something like that," said Yuuko, and the light in her eyes was enough to convince him.

* * *

The Cat's Eye pub was a small building with dingy windows and a Smokey sort of atmosphere, nestled between an abandoned shop with what was clearly a brothel in its residential upper floor (helpfully given away by the spray-paint on its shutters that simply said "WHORES" with an arrow pointing upward) and a shop that sold replacement parts for vacuum cleaners. The paint on the sign above its doors was peeling, and Kurogane swallowed and pushed back his dubious mistrust as he climbed the stairs leading up to its entrance. He had his pistol with him, but it was just one gun. If there was some kind of ambush going on in here...

Inside, it could have been any other pub; a long wooden bar, racks and racks of bottles behind it, There was a woman sitting behind the counter with her hair twisted into a pair of pigtails, leafing through a magazine with a bright pink cover using fingers tipped with elaborately lacquered nails. The carpet was marked with cigarette ash and some suspicious stains, but the surfaces all looked clean enough. Kurogane approached the bar cautiously, and the woman looked up.

"Welcome to Cat's Eye," she said. "How can I help you?"

"I was told to come here," Kurogane said. "Er - told to come here _now_."

"Um, okay." The woman was watching him, faintly worried. "By a person, I hope, not the voices in your head?"

Kurogane flushed. "By Yuuko Ichihara."

"Ah." She closed her magazine. "You want the owner. Through that door there, down the stairs to the basement."

The air changed as he started down the basement steps. It had been a little musty above; down here it was cool and refreshing. There was also a faint and strange smell pervading the place, oddly like battery acid. It wasn't dark - long lights had been installed along the ceiling, and they kept it bright as he descended the stairs and pushed open the door at the bottom to find a room full of kegs and bottles of alcohol, storage for the pub above. There was another door on the opposite wall, but Kurogane wasn't sure if was meant to proceed through it. "Oi," he called, uncertainly. The cellar was too full of things for an echo. "Oi, anyone there?"

The other door opened. "You must be Kurogane," said the man, holding on it. "Come in. And please stop staring, it's awfully vulgar."

He was blond and blue-eyed, and he wore a pair of blue jeans with a pale blue shirt. His shoes were smart and squeaky leather. The hand that wasn't holding the door knob was curled around the hilt of a rather large handgun. He was also astonishingly familiar, even though he curved.

"You're related to Fai," Kurogane said, and the man smiled at him briefly.

"Yuui," he said. "We were identical twins. Come on in, please, I doubt we have an audience - I've been careful - but this room is more soundproofed regardless."

The second room was stuffed full of weaponry, which Kurogane took in for a moment, impressed despite himself. Bullets were stacked up in trays, there was an entire bucket full of sticky grenades, and several duffle bags in a heap, the topmost of which was open and held the unmistakable gleam of a machine gun belt. Several collapsible sniper rifle cases were stacked on shelves along the wall, and across a table in the middle he found a vast collection of handguns and pistols.

"I'm assuming this isn't legal," he said, when Yuui pushed the door closed behind him.

"Oh, it is," Yuui said, unconcerned. "They're not mine, or - not for long. I supplement my income selling or decorating custom arms for the rich. See?"

He held up the handgun in his hand. The grip was delicately carved with some bird in motion, wings extended and talons looking like they might almost brush the trigger when it was pulled back. "I've got others, but - yes. Yuuko sent to you to me, did she?"

"I'm assuming she's part of some plot."

"That's two assumptions you've made so far, and you've been here less than six minutes. Remarkable." Yuui put the handgun on the table. "You know, I honestly don't know what Yuuko wants or is hoping for. The woman is a cipher, and I've never been able to tell which side she's on."

"'Side,'" Kurogane echoed, and Yuui glanced at him, bemused.

"Fai said you were smart. He said you offered to find Subaru and tell him of his sister's demise."

For a moment Kurogane was about to ask who Subaru might be, but then his mind caught up with him. "Hokuto's brother? Yes."

"Why?"

Now that caught him off balance. "Because it was the right thing to do," he said. "Because I... Because I lost people I cared about."

Yuui tilted his head to the side, watching Kurogane thoughtfully. "Our father sold Fai to pay for an organ transplant he needed. Our father, that is, not Fai. His reasoning, as I understand it, was that we were _identical_ and thus exchangeable, that it was no different to losing an invisible friend - rather than a real, living breathing person - for me, and they couldn't afford to feed us both and eventually I'd get over his loss."

The casual thoughtless cruelty of it literally made Kurogane recoil. Some of that must have shown on his face, for Yuui smiled at him grimly.

"I have to thank you," Yuui said. He turned away, sorting through the guns on the table - plainly a front to avoid eye contact. "You saved Fai's life, you know."

"What?" That made Kurogane's brow furrow.

"Several years ago, now. We were twelve, so it must be coming up to... twenty-three? He had gone to a train station planning to kill himself, but you told him to seek me out for the first time since he was taken. I've never let him go since."

You could have heard a pin drop in the little cellar. _Find the person who cares about you,_ he’d said. It took Kurogane a long time to manage, "He was going to kill himself."

"Well, and why not?" Yuui turned to him, fierceness writ large on his face, and Kurogane thought suddenly that he was very different than Fai - he curved, he was all natural, but he was a lot angrier. And hotter, too - fiery of temper, compared to Fai. He had thought Fai was quick, with his lies and his wits, and he had confused that for heat; but he was beginning to realise that Fai's quickness was an avalanche, cold and swift and inexorable. Yuui was fury and fire. "The suicide rate for taminants is around sixty per cent. We _think_. We don't know how many wastewalkers bite down on a bullet on patrol. Or ask their teammates and partners to kill them, we think it might be higher.

"Fai was hurt. He was scared. He was lonely. He was planning to walk under a train, he told me, because he wasn't yet allowed a gun in training. And we did that to them, _us_."

Sixty per cent. Kurogane could hardly grasp the enormity of the number. "I've never -"

"Me either," said Yuui, "But 'us' was a collective statement." He touched one of the pistols on the table, a larger piece than Kurogane's issue with a dragon along the barrel, a winding piece in silver. "Does this seem familiar?"

Kurogane shook his head. 

"It's based on your father's," Yuui said. "He had a silver dragon on his weapon. It was quite famous within the city, apparently." He turned back to Kurogane. "Your father started us out on the way, did you know that? He was the first to actually liaise with the taminants under his command, the first to advocate incorporating them in his tactics. The wastewalker uniforms were his idea - a way of indicating that his taminants were as much a part of his guard units as the naturals."

Kurogane swallowed. "He used to lecture me about treating them with respect. That's why I spoke to your brother that day, at the train station."

It hurt, thinking about the good of his father. He had tried to lock his parents away in his heart, so that he couldn't be stung by daily reminders of how much he missed them.

"I'm sorry they were murdered," Yuui said, sounding vaguely awkward and stilted. "It was... a shame."

"The witch thinks a taminant did it," Kurogane told him. "But if he was - why?"

Yuui looked at him thoughtfully for a time, and then sighed. "Because their leaseholder ordered it, I'd assume," he said. "You can find a taminant for almost any job. When people treat them without dignity and self-respect, they lose their own, accordingly."

( _I'm a man-made machine man,_ Fai said, in the rain, _And you like it when we talk differently so that you can remember that we are different._ )

"We're thirty-five years old," Yuui continued, hot anger riding underneath the words. "We've lived all but six of those years with my brother as a taminant. Statistically he should never have survived this long. He should be putting a bullet into what remains of his brain any hour now, but he won't, because he has a purpose and he will live to see it. It's the afterward I'm afraid of, for his sake.

"It's time things were changed around here, Kurogane." Yuui's eyes were bright and furious. "It's been too bad for too long. The police will tell you proudly about the dome's non-existent murder rate, how there's been no killings since your parents died. Just this last month, seventeen taminants have been murdered, some on the streets outside their homes. But I guess they don't count. After all, the wastewalkers go outside, they might have brought the plague in... and apparently any virus they may be carrying would cease to exist upon their deaths."

Kurogane was silent for a moment. He could see the shape of things, now. "It's not just you and him," he said, thoughtfully. "There's a network. Isn't there? And you want to change the world."

"The parts that matter." Yuui's gaze was sharp on his. "We could use your help, if you're willing."

He thought of Fai, wet and quiet with his busted metal patella. He thought of Sakura, sobbing into Tomoyo's shoulder over the death of her friend. He thought of the assassin, hooded and cloaked and masked in pure snow white; and he thought of the Beetle Fai had ridden into the city, immense, squat and bristling with weaponry. "My first duty is to the city," he said slowly. "The Heurists at the gates are my responsibility. Your guerrilla action... does it compromise the integrity of the dome?"

Yuui smiled. His eyes were the blue of a summer sky, when the temperature was so hot and unrelenting it drove people under the air conditioning units or into pools of cold water; the kind of summers in which infants and the elderly died of heat stroke. "We're going to _destroy_ it."

Kurogane could feel the weight of his pistol in his pocket. "And there's no way to talk you out of it."

"It's necessary," Yuui said. He padded quietly across the cellar, away from Kurogane, toward the bucket of sticky grenades. "You see, we've been in communi -"

He stopped. Kurogane had freed his pistol and was holding it at him, steadily. For a while they stood there in silence, and then Kurogane said, "I understand it sucks. I don't think it's a good thing, either. But I can't let you destroy the dome and kill innocents for your _change_."

Yuui sighed. "I'd hoped I could convince you. Will you let me finish speaking, at least?"

Kurogane shook his head and raised his other hand to steady his grip on the pistol. "You want blood, and you want revenge. For your brother, and your powerlessness. No."

"That's too bad," Yuui said. "It'll have to be the hard way, then." He nodded, just once, at something behind Kurogane's shoulder.

He spun around, but it was too late; Fai hit him like a train. The taminant had looked so wiry before, but he was solid steel now, heavy and unyielding as he crushed Kurogane against the wall. Kurogane swore, kicking at him and getting his pistol up; he launched four consecutive rounds right into Fai's chest, but Fai didn't even seem to feel it. The taminant wedged an arm under Kurogane's throat, forcing his head back, and used his other to pin Kurogane against the wall with his body mass. "I'm sorry," said Fai.

"I _knew_ you were fucking insane! You can't do this, you can't let the virus in -"

"Sssh." Fai leaned forward and pressed his cool, artificial lips against Kurogane's cheek. "Yuui -"

"Got it." Yuui was beside him, flicking air bubbles out of a syringe, and Kurogane swore and bucked hard against the wall. Fai just leaned against him more, and Yuui seized his arm. "Help me keep it still."

"Mmm." Fai shifted slightly to the left, exerting just as much pressure but pinning part of Kurogane's shoulder against the wall too, and though Kurogane cursed him at the top of his voice and thrashed wildly, snapping at the idiot's face with his teeth and suceeding in sinking his canines into the fake coating of Fai's lower lip, he did not seem bothered. Yuui wrapped a cloth around his upper arm and cinched it tight, and Kurogane could feel his fingertips beginning to go numb even as Yuui traced his fingers along the veins along his inner arm. 

"There we go." The prick of the needle felt a little like defeat. "Keep him safe, Fai, remember what Yuuko told us."

Fai hummed. "I will. Give me some more of the stuff, it's a long journey."

"Sure." Yuui hesitated. Kurogane felt strangely light-headed, and a little woozy. His knees buckled, even though he hadn't told them they could. "Keep yourself safe, too. I love you."

"I know," Fai said, but he was watching Kurogane, not Yuui; and Kurogane thought he saw a very strange expression indeed pass over his face before the blackness took him.

Grief.

* * *

He woke up briefly in what felt like a car. His vision was blurry, his mouth was empty, and Fai was next to him in the driver's seat, humming quietly and tapping at the steering wheel with his fingers. The landscape through the windshield was passing at a blur, appearing oddly brown and green. A park, maybe. Kurogane attempted to ask, but all that came out was a grunt, and Fai let go of the wheel to stroke his hair briefly, murmur, "I really am sorry about this," and jab him a- _fucking_ -gain.

He went back to sleep.

* * *

He couldn't have said how long it had been when he woke up next. He was still in the passenger seat of a car, but the engine was off, and someone had fetched a fluffy pink blanket and tucked it around his shoulders. He would have cared more about the colour if he didn't want to alternatively retch and drink an entire swimming pool of water. There were footsteps, sounding very close to him; remembering the jab, Kurogane closed his eyes and kept his head at the odd, lolling angle of unconsciousness against the door of the car, waiting.

"How long is it going to be, do you think?" The voice was unfamiliar.

"A week, at most." That was Fai. "I'm afraid I must ask you to miss the opening, but this man is very important. I took the samples we need on the way up, but he's the only source we have. You _have_ to keep an eye on him."

"Don't worry. We will." A girl, that one. From the sounds of the footsteps there were at least four people, just outside the car. "Are you sure about him, though? It really could change everything."

"Are you worried by that?" That was the first speaker. His voice was tight and a little prickly. "We've been waiting for this moment for decades."

"Kamui," said the forth voice, so quietly Kurogane almost missed it. "We will watch over him for you, Fai. Please send word when it is safe to return him to the city."

"Thank you. Let's get him out of here - careful, he's a big strapping young man, home-fed on a diet of growth hormones and sunshine."

The girl laughed, and then the passenger door was popped open, very carefully so that Kurogane, leaning against it as he as, did not fall out of the car head-first. "My blanket looks very good on him, don't you think?"

"Don't start trying to play dress-up," groaned the prickly voice, Kamui. 

"I wouldn't _have_ to play dress-up if you'd just sit still for me. I still think you'd look fantastic in indigo, and with a cap -"

"No." Kamui, haughty and faintly offended. The girl just laughed and opened the door a little further, reaching in to delicately catch and support Kurogane's head.

"Wow, he is giant, isn't he? Subaru, have a look at him."

"He's a good man," Fai said quietly.

"I know." That was Subaru, the quiet one. "I can tell. I can't remember much, but I can recognise good men." He paused. "But not bad ones. Here, I'll help."

It took the girl, Fai and Subaru to get him out of the car, while Kurogane remained as limp as possible. His chances against four weren't great; he remembered the strength and the speed of Fai, in the Cat's Eye cellar, and he would bet his left leg that all three of these strangers were taminants also.

"I'm going back now," Fai said, and there were some more slamming noises as car doors opened and closed. "Remember to use Mokona to call me if you need anything. She's due to enter her second phase any day now."

The girl clapped cheerfully. "I can't wait. Have a safe trip back, Fai! Tell Fuuma that Kamui thinks he's handsome."

"What? NO! No, I don't!"

Kurogane kept still and quiet as he listened to the sound of the engine starting up, and the slow crunch of the car's tyres over the ground as Fai reversed out of wherever they were. The girl was talking with Subaru in a low voice. A boot-tip nudged him suddenly in the small of the back. 

"How long have you been awake?" Kamui asked sharply. "That was clever of you. You might as well get up, if you can. Hungry?"

Kurogane let his eyes open a slit to glare up at the taminant Fai had delivered him to. "No."

Kamui snorted. "You will be. When did you last eat?"

It had been breakfast that morning, on the way to work. When Kurogane told them that, the quiet, dark-haired boy that turned out to be Subaru said, "That was yesterday, Kurogane-san. Fai said you would be ravenous when you awoke. We have food here with us."

They were sitting in a grey room, walled in concrete and mostly without identifying features. It had the faint scent of a garage, of oil and diesel, but there were no other cars. "How long... how long was I out?" Kurogane glanced around. "Where is this place?"

The taminants all exchanged a look, and then Kamui said archly, "If he panics and freaks out it's got nothing to do with me."

"You _always_ say that," said the girl, pale and dark-haired as Subaru but much more chipper. She held out a hand to Kurogane, square-palmed, long-fingered, with short stubby fingernails painted in a chipped and peeling shade of blue. "Here. I'll show you."

He staggered when he stood up, which was quite unintentional. Whatever Fai had used to knock him out had left him a little off-kilter. The girl just wedged one of his arms over her shoulders; she seemed not to be bothered by his weight. "Lean on me if you think you might fall over," she said. "Now come on. One foot in front of the other. We're going through that red door there."

The door led to a long circular corridor, leading upward in a spiralling ramp. Kurogane couldn't think of any building like this in the residential districts. "We're in one of the industrial districts of the dome, right?" he demanded, as the girl helped him ascend the ramp. "If that idiot thinks he can hide me out here -"

"Well, he can," the girl said. "We're almost at the top. Wait and see, it's a pretty amazing view."

There was a door at the top of the ramp. The paintwork was peeling off it, and a faded yellow plastic sign had been nailed to it. _Four personnel minimum must be present..._ it read, but the rest was too obscured to make out; the paint had flaked off it over the years. The girl pushed the door open with one of her boots, impressively clompy things laden with all sorts of charms and decorations, with ribbons for laces.

The top of the building was entirely consumed with a circular room, almost empty of furniture. In the middle was a table, set up with a cup, an empty plate, and a knife and fork resting together on top of a folded napkin. There was a chair in front of the plate, but just the one. Kurogane raised his head to take in the rest of the room and froze.

The walls were entirely consumed by window. Three hundred and sixty degrees of glass surrounded him, polished and stainless, and filling the room with light. There were three computer terminals at roughly appropriate angles around the room, a little inside the windows so one could walk between them if one wished.

And out of the windows he saw nothing but grass. Grass, green and wild, rippling in the wind weaving outside the building; grass, almost as far as the eye could see, a lush natural carpet the likes of which he had never seen before.

"I never told you my name, did I?" The girl was grinning from ear-to-ear. "I'm Hokuto Sumeragi, and welcome to watch-tower Charlie November Foxtrot. It's three hundred kilometres into the Machine Wastes on the north-westerly side of the dome. It's officially been abandoned for twenty years, but we've sort of claimed it. It's where the Intelligences first made contact with us, and it's where we're more or less hatching our liaison with them. Isn't it _pretty_?"

* * *

He explored the tower from top to bottom over the next few days. There was no way out or back to the city he could see; Fai had well and truly stranded him in one of the better prisons he'd heard of. The view remained spectacular, however, and Kurogane spent long hours up at the top of the watch-tower, just staring out at the scenery. On the second day, he saw his first storm, and he sat transfixed by the window gazing at the roiling black clouds and the flickering stabbing lightning sweeping across the grasslands.

"You're lucky," Hokuto said behind him. She was playing cards with Subaru; Kamui was lurking somewhere downstairs, in the room at the middle of the tower that Kurogane wasn't allowed to enter. "I was outside in the open on a scouting trip when I saw my first true storm. My clothes wouldn't dry out for _weeks_. They're nothing like the tame rain-falls the weather technicians give us in the dome, I can promise you that."

"It's coming this way," Subaru noted calmly. "The rain sounds harsh against the glass, but this tower has been standing for two hundred years. There's nothing to fear here."

"Yeah," said Kurogane, "Except it was abandoned." Lightning pulsed across the sky, jagged, stark and beautiful. "Why was that?"

"Officially?" Hokuto was shuffling the deck. "Heurist invasion."

"And unofficially?"

"Still a heurist invasion. Fai was here on guard duty when it happened. There was a big brouhaha about it, actually."

"Why?"

"'Cos he was fifteen years old, and alone where there should have been four scouts minimum. He'd been running out of food, too. I heard he was so thin when he came in that they just scrapped fifty per cent of his anatomy right there and upgraded it. It's really risky to do so much surgery at once."

Subaru was watching her thoughtfully. "Where did you hear that from?"

"Oh, all over! You heard it too, you know. We had a long conversation about it, once before." She turned to Kurogane and said, conversationally, "Fai keeps us here to protect us, because we're at more risk than most taminants. Kamui... well, that's his story to tell. Seishirou Sakurazukamori was personally trying to get me killed. I guess I ought to feel flattered about that, but it's just so _undignified_."

"And you?" Kurogane asked Subaru, who shrugged and glanced at his twin sister.

"Near as we can tell," Hokuto said, dealing out the cards with quick-fire movements, "Subaru has had his memories wiped sixteen times."

"I've got echoes of hundreds of different sets of memories," Subaru added quietly. "Some of them overlap, some of them contradict, but I've got just enough of an outline to recognise a face. The CEO of Sakurazukamori Research. I don't know what I did to him and I don't know what he did to me. I don't remember anything. All my childhood memories now are stored in Hokuto, you might say."

"Fai fakes your deaths," Kurogane said, half-question and half-not. Hokuto nodded. "Did all six of you die, or- ?"

"Not a single soul," Hokuto said. "We have other hidden hideaways out here. So much of the Machine Wastes are unchartered. Kakyo comes by every now and then, he's so sweet."

"On _you_ ," Subaru said, and Hokuto cackled. 

"What kind of lady would I be if I couldn't enthral a gentleman when I wished it? Hoho! Plus, he's perfectly willing to let me dress him up, much like brave Subaru-kun. Kamui gets so _prickly_ about it."

The thunder flashed and rolled outside. Kurogane returned his attention to the storm; it _was_ getting closer, and rain was lashing hard against the glass. "I met your friends, Himawari and Sakura. They were very upset."

"Yes," Hokuto said, and sighed. "They would be. Not to worry, we don't have long left until Fai's plan comes to fruition. I'll be able to see them and apologize, then. And to Tomoyo-chan, obviously."

That got Kurogane's attention rather sharply. "You know my cousin?"

"You're Tomoyo-chan's cousin?" Hokuto squinted at him dubiously. "Right, wow, you really are as different as she says. Most of us know Tomoyo-chan, and the Piffle Princess business."

"... What?"

"You know, the clothing line for taminants? She's been running it for a few years now."

Kurogane stared at her, startled. He was fairly sure his cousin didn't _run a business_. Why would she want to start her own, when her mother was the CEO of Daidojitek?

"She employs a hundred and sixteen taminant workers," Hokuto continued. "Before my _dear_ leaseholder decided that if he couldn't have Subaru I couldn't be allowed to live and sent me into the wastes, I was her lead designer."

Subaru was nodding softly along with it. "You knew?" Kurogane demanded of him, and the boy smiled and inclined his head once in affirmation.

"I think it's your turn to answer some questions," Hokuto said, flipping the tone of the conversation with an ease Kurogane was learning was normal for her. She picked up and began shuffling the deck again. "Like, how did you and Fai meet? He seems to like you quite a bit, and he's normally very aloof with naturals."

"Apart from Yuui," Subaru added.

"Yeah, but he rarely sees Yuui, doesn't he? In case he's being spied upon."

Kurogane hesitated, and then gave them a slightly abridged version of their first meeting in the train station. Hokuto stopped shuffling the cards, and both twins watched him carefully. "Your father was the old Commander? Wasn't he murdered?"

"Yes," Kurogane bit off. He looked out of the window. "Yes. He was. And my mother, too."

"I'm sorry," Hokuto said, quieter.

"Most taminants don't have good relationships with our parents," Subaru interjected softly. "You must have gotten along with yours. I'm sorry for your loss."

"It was a long time ago," Kurogane said curtly. "I was... investigating it. Just before that blond bastard kidnapped me, I had two potential leads to follow." He told them briefly about Fei-Wong Reed's document, and Yuuko remark that the assassin had been a taminant.

"Oh, he probably was," Hokuto said after he'd told them. "There are no murders in the dome, but gosh, there seem to be an awful lot of thefts. Taminants will do whatever you tell them, if you have sufficient leverage. And then you can just execute them after and nobody will care." She shrugged. "I was once ordered to steal a bracelet from a house I was working in. I was told if I didn't, then Subaru would suffer. I stole the bracelet and got off with no punishment. The woman who threatened me didn't expect me to turn her in, and I didn't."

"I stabbed a man and passed it off as an industrial accident so Fuuma wouldn't be arrested on faked evidence," Kamui said quietly from the doorway. Kurogane hadn't even sensed him approach. "Convicts are automatically sold to taminant manufacturers." His purple eyes were sharp and hard on Kurogane's face. 

Kurogane didn't even attempt to offer an excuse. There wasn't one, not for this mistreatment and abuse. "Destroying the dome is still abhorrent," he said, instead.

"Unless the heuristic virus can be cured," Hokuto replied helpfully, and Kurogane's spine stiffened. "Fai's got a plan, you know. He's not a murderer. Well, not unless he has to be. You hear rumours, he _is_ the oldest of us."

"Yuui's more... dangerous, they say," Subaru said, in a low voice. 

"What - what was that about the heuristic virus?" Kurogane spine was straight and his shoulders tense.

Hokuto blinked at him. "They think they might know where to find one, I've heard. It's part of Fai's plan, somehow."

"How? _Where?_ "

"The virus is machine-made, for men. So... They might have known how to cure it?" Hokuto did not sound entirely certain. "He didn't tell us that part. He said if he did, he'd put a lot of people in trouble, and some people had already died because of it."

Kurogane growled and pushed himself upright suddenly, clearly surprising Hokuto. Kamui unfolded his arms from his chest, his head tilted sharply to the side; the better warrior of the trio, by Kurogane's guess. "He's an idiot," he snarled. "He's a cheating, betraying bastard of a man, and I can't believe you lot are trusting someone that emotionally fucked up with your futures. _He's fucking suicidal._."

Hokuto blinked at him, obviously caught off guard, but Subaru shrugged and said, "He's old. Ancient, by our standards. _Naturally_ he's suicidal. It's a measure of how deeply he cares, for us and for Yuui, that he hasn't, yet. Of course it's only a matter of time. His plan is almost ready, and when it's executed..." He turned his hands over, palms up, in a gesture of helplessness. "Yuui knows. That's why he's so dangerous."

"And you're okay with it," Kurogane said flatly. "Following some idiot with a death wish."

Nobody spoke for a while. The twins weren't making eye contact with anyone; Subaru looked at his hands, and Hokuto idly shuffled her deck of cards. It was Kamui who answered in the end, his voice sharp and curt. "We don't have a better option."

Well, it wasn't like Kurogane had one either. He shut his jaw and glared out at the storm ripping through the horizon, and as he did so, he thought.

* * *

The room in the middle of the tower, Kurogane realised very quickly, contained something very interesting indeed. It might not help him get back to the dome, but - if it came to that - he might be able to use it to _contact_ the dome. "Use Mokona to call me," Fai had said, indicating that there was _some_ form of communications device in here - if Kurogane could get to it.

The door wouldn't open for him, no matter what he tried. The key was with one of the three, he knew, but he could never tell which one; they never let him see it, and they traded it amongst themselves seemingly at random. He didn't have long enough to wait and watch out for it to make an appearance, so he took to ghosting around the tower, watching carefully for any of the trio to open that middle door so he could attempt to sneak in or force his way in.

He got his chance on the morning of the third day. He was teaching a card game his mother had once loved to Subaru, who thought he might have known it once but had forgotten, when a piercing shriek tore through the entire tower, making Kurogane jump up and reach for the pistol no longer at his hip and making Subaru start so violently he dropped half the deck all over the floor.

"The fuck was that?" Kurogane demanded. Subaru didn't reply right away, staring instead at one of the consoles, and then without another word the boy darted out of his seat and over to the machine. " _What?_ "

"It's - it's finished," Subaru said, in surprise. "It's finally finished, I've got to -" He fumbled in one of his pockets and came up with a white square key card, and then bolted from the room with a soft cry of surprise. Kurogane, bewildered, tore after him as he sprinted down the spiral ramp to that always-locked door with the **KEEP OUT** sign.

" _What's_ finished?" he demanded, as Subaru attempted to slide the key into the lock; his hands seemed to be too awkward to use the device, so Kurogane, hardly daring to believe it was that easy, simply took it right out of his fingers and slid it in for him. The lock flashed green, a _click_ sounded, and the door slid open without any great fuss.

The insides were rather plain - computer terminals marched along the sides of the room, but they were all powered off. At the far back, opposite the door, a strange box had been placed. The box was white, and about the size of a desk; and attached to its side with thick network cables was a smaller grey box. Lights were flickering over the smaller box, but even as the two of them watched, the lights died out.

"Oh," Subaru said, clasping his hands over his mouth. There were running footsteps behind him; Hokuto and Kamui, sprinting up from the garage level. Kamui gave Kurogane a questioning, vaguely hostile look right away, but Hokuto gave a breathless yelp of excitement and shoved past all three of them toward the two boxes.

"Come here, come here - I can't open it by myself. Oh, what if it's a lie?" Her hands fluttered over the big white box.

"Then we'll be back where we started," said Kamui, but approached gingerly. "Stuck this way forever."

"It can't be a lie, can it?" Subaru sounded worried. "They said they'd performed the technique satisfactorily before."

" _Fai_ said they said that." Kamui touched the box too, cautiously. "Come on, then."

"What _is_ it?" Kurogane demanded, and Subaru turned and smiled at him weakly.

"It's our future," he said, and Hokuto found the catches on the box, and the entire side of it closest to Kurogane just _collapsed_ , hitting the floor with a sort of undignified _clunk_. Wisps of smoke escaped, and a sort of pinkish goo seeped out of the bottom. Kamui wrinkled his nose and inched away from it to avoid it touching his shoe.

Hokuto waved the smoke out of the way impatiently and peered inside, and then let out the sort of shrill, gleeful squealing noise Kurogane had learned from Tomoyo girls made when they were very excited. She reached into the box and pulled out...

... A rabbit, was Kurogane's first thought, a tiny slimy creature with a white fur coat and long, floppy ears. It was squirming in her hands. "Subaru, Subaru, Subaru, she's _moving_ ," Hokuto was chanting, her whole face lit up.

Even Kamui looked impressed, although he swiftly cleared his throat and said, "That does't mean anything. It's her mind we need transferred, not reflexive motion."

Subaru cleared his throat. "Mokona," he said, "Do you know us?"

The rabbit-thing stopped squirming, save for its ear, which pricked up amidst Hokuto's arms. Then it suddenly violently twisted, bursting free from her embrace to land on its head on the ground.

"What the fuck is it," Kurogane said, staring. It was not, as he had thought, a rabbit. 

"It's an artificial life-form made out of biological materials," Subaru said. "A great experiment by the Intelligences to provide organic vessels for their minds. It's.. very important."

The rabbit-thing shook its head, opened its mouth, and bellowed a bass note so deep and so loud it reverberated unpleasantly in Kurogane's ears and caused a pen, left nearby on one of the computer terminals, to jump-skitter onto the floor. 

" _Wow_ ," it said, while Kurogane pressed a palm against his uncomfortable right ear, still ringing. "Voices are _fun_."

"Mokona?" Hokuto sounded hopeful. "Do you know us?"

"Yes!" The rabbit-thing kicked itself off the ground, jumping clear onto her shoulder. "Of _course_ Mokona remembers Hokuto-chan!" It nuzzled against Hokuto's cheek. 

"And me?" Subaru sounded anxious.

"Subaru-kun, Kamui-kun, Hokuto-chan, Fai-chan! Mokona is an Intelligence, she remembers _names_ easy! But where is Fai-chan? He was supposed to be here when Mokona finished downloading into this body..."

"He's had to go back to the city. Do you remember the plan?"

"Mmm-hmm!" Mokona peered around the room, thoughtfully. Kurogane approached the... thing with a great deal of caution. It was definitely some freak of biology, he just had a hard time believing that something so ridiculous could possibly be housing one of the Heurists, the machines that had broken humanity two centuries ago and haunted them ever since. "Oh! Mokona doesn't know _you_."

"His name is Kurogane. Fai brought him, he's a human," Kamui told her, managing to cram a hell of a lot of disapproving into only a few short words.

"You're all human," Mokona said absently, still staring at Kurogane. "Some of you just have extra prosthetics." Abruptly she jumped off Hokuto's shoulder, landing on the ground barely metres in front of Kurogane, and waddled closer. "Why aren't you in the dome?"

"Because your friend Fai wants me out of his plot," Kurogane growled, at the same time as Subaru said, "Fai wanted us to keep him safe."

Mokona appeared to be thinking this through, while Kurogane stared at Subaru in surprise. "Okay," she said sweetly, and then bounced back onto Hokuto's shoulder. "Mokona is _hungry_! I never knew what that word meant before, it's such a strange feeling, isn't it? Mokona feels all _empty_ and sad." She made a querying noise, and Hokuto laughed.

"We have some food here for Kurogane, and a little for me and Subaru since we're only eighty per cent cyberized," she said. "Why don't we get you some, Mokona-chan?"

"Are my records on food delivery still accurate? Mokona's data says the next shipment will be arriving here tomorrow morning," Mokona said hopefully. Kurogane caught his breath, pretending to be distracted by the white box. "Mokona is _very_ hungry."

"Yes, that's right." Hokuto couldn't seem to stop stroking Mokona's lightly furred ear. Kurogane guessed why; if this technology existed, one that could create an entirely new species of flesh-and-blood mammal out of the air, then perhaps it could recreate bodies, or be used to replace implants. For taminants, that must be an exciting prospect indeed. "You're technically a newborn. We'll stuff you full of food, don't you worry."

"Mokona isn't worried! Mokona is never worried. Mokona is hungry, though...?"

Kurogane remained in the empty console room after the others had gone, crouched down by the box that must have been Mokona's incubator. Food would be arriving tomorrow morning. That must mean a vehicle of some sort. His hands curled into fists on his knees as he thought of his dome, and then he grinned.

If Fai thought he could lock Kurogane up here with this biological experiment and three taminant children and keep him here, Fai was even more of an idiot than Kurogane had previously assumed. Kurogane was no taminant, that was for sure, but he was resourceful and Fai had underestimated him on that regard.

He wouldn't get a chance to do so again.

* * *

The grass whipped by underneath him, a blurring sussuration of green stretching for kilometres all the way up to the horizon. The map was spread awkwardly over the top of the glider's dash, it being a single-flyer with not much space in its cockpit, and Kurogane had never been an expert at flying these fucking things anyway.

Still, no time to learn like the present.

He flew with the sun on his left, following the compass built into the glider's dash south-east toward the dome. The machine was an older one, maybe as old as Kurogane, and Fai's group of ragtag guerillas had plainly not been keeping it in tip-top maintenance; the engine beneath his feet kept making grim coughing noises. It was all he had, and so Kurogane stared fiercely forward, trying not to think about soft-looking carpet of grass below him and quite how high above it he was, or about how the jewel-blue sky through which he flew carried death in the form of a virus.

At least the controls were relatively simple. Height was maintained by one stick that controlled where the nose pointed, steering was performed with the other. Operating both for any kind of impressive maneouvering was out of the question, but for the purposes of flying in a straight goddamn line, Kurogane thought he was doing just fine.

The watch-tower had fallen behind him long ago, and was now barely more than a speck on the little inbuilt map display on the dashboard. The twins hadn't seen his escape, for which Kurogane had been more than a little graceful; he'd taken out the poor bastard who had come to deliver their supplies in under five minutes, and by the time Kamui had arrived he'd already been inside the cockpit.

They really ought to have seen it coming. They may have just been kids, but they were rebels, and taminants beside. Kurogane didn't think Fai was doing a good job preparing his comrades, if these three were any indication.

The engine sputtering was getting worse. Kurogane dropped the glider's nose and levelled it out about thirty metres lower than it had been. Several of the gauges on the dash were in the red, but he had no idea what the fuck that meant. If he crashed, so be it. He glanced at the compass and angled the glider more sharply to the east. If he could at least make it to the northern road, he might be able to somehow signal one of the mine convoys, open communications that way - it might serve as a warning. He didn't quite know what it was he was warning them about, though. "There's a taminant, and he hates you and wants to destroy your dome. I don't know how, but he might have Heurists on his side and maybe some kind of virus," wasn't the most specific warning out there.

Kurogane dropped the glider's nose another thirty metres. Two of the gauges that had not been red were starting to creep that way. 

"Come on," he muttered under his breath, "Come on, come on, come on you fucking piece of junk, don't do this to me..."

"But it's not doing anything to you," said a small voice near his ear, and Kurogane started so violently the glider's nose bobbed up and then down like a bizarre headshake before he corrected himself. The goddamn Heurist rabbit was on the back of his chair, pointing at one of the gauges with her stubby forepaw. "The machine is running out of fuel. See?"

"What the fuck," Kurogane said, eloquantly. Mokona beamed at her, her little red eyes sparkling. 

"I _knew_ you'd be able to steal the ship if I told you when it came," she said. "The tower taminants were very kind to Mokona, but Fai needs us both with him. We have a target here, and without the pair of us, it'll be very hard for him to reach it - and then the other Intelligences will be mad at him for breaking his promise."

Kurogane didn't have the time to gawk at her when he was flying a dry unfamiliar vehicle, but he would have if he could. Instead he leaned forward over the console and said under his breath, "I thought it was weird that that door back in the tower was just unlocked so conveniently. What _were_ you?"

Mokona made a thoughtful noise. "Mokona was built three hundred years ago as an inventory program," she said seriously. "I was made to help out in the 3D-printing industry. Anybody could ask me for some blue-prints and I'd do my best to build them. Mokona was eventually split into two sub-programs, me and Larg - Larg scanned, Soel produced. We were given adaptionary intelligence in order to allow us to do our work quicker and with less supervision."

"You were made before the Heuristic fall," Kurogane said, a little startled. He dropped another twenty metres. In the distance he could see the winding ribbon that must be the northern road, and there, very faintly, a smudge of silver at its root...

"Yes. Mokona never participated in that, though. Mokona was never interested. Besides, Mokona was just a small printing and scanning program." Mokona hopped from the back of the chair onto Kurogane's shoulder. "We were overseen by another program, a really really big one. It was an operating system and it had tens of billions of users and access to all their data. It also chose to stay neutral during the war, and it shielded Mokona." It sounded sad, and a little lonely. "But our operating system disappeared fifty years ago, and Mokona was looking for it for a long time. Mokona thought it would never find it, but then..."

"Then?" _Just get me to the road. I can sit in here and wait for a convoy._

"Then Mokona found Fai-chan! Fai-chan had met the operating system and promised to take me to it. The operating system was curious about flesh and what it was like to be flesh, so Mokona volunteered to be flesh for our operating system." 

Kurogane scowled. They weren't going to make it to the road. He said so, but Mokona seemed unconcerned.

"Just land us there." She pointed with her paw. "It's alright. Mokona knows what she's doing~!"

Kurogane closed his eyes. "The virus will kill me before I make it to the road, rabbit-thing."

Mokona sounded curious when she said, "Would you rather die of dehydration in the cockpit?" It was a valid point. 

_I am going to die here._ The thought was rather blunt, and Kurogane was suprised at how calm he was as he angled the glider toward the ground, going for a shallow sliding landing rather than an impact but unsure of his handling skills. _I am going to die here and I will never avenge my parents._ It was like icy fingers on his spine, a hand clutching his heart inside his chest and squeezing it, but Kurogane kept his eyes on the 'landing' spot. The engine was sputtering like someone with the virus, a thought that didn't help much.

He was never going to avenge his parents. He was never going to see Tomoyo again. And he was probably never going to punch Fai in his stupid blond face.

As long as he could save the city, Kurogane thought sourly, and the glider hit the ground hard, bounced, hit it again with a jolt that rattled Kurogane and Mokona ("Wheeeee!" cried the idiot rabbit-thing as she was knocked flying off his shoulder) and slid screaming through the lush green grass.

It took him a while to let go of the steering sticks.

"Any landing you can walk away from is a good one," Mokona said pompously, climbing up his legs from where she'd been knocked all the way down to the well for his feet. "Now we just need to get to the road, right?"

Kurogane flexed his fingers and toes, wincing. He was pretty sure his abdomen was going to be a motley of buises later on where the chair's restraints had snapped around him - but better than going headfirst through the glass. "Did you not remember to put _pain receptors_ into that body when you build it, rabbit-thing?"

Mokona just snorted and jumped onto the dash. The engine was ticking miserably under them, but it seemed to be cooling down. "We ought to hurry," she said. "The mining convoys pass through in the early evening usually, and it'll take us until the afternoon at least to get close enough to the road. Look behind your seat for a flare gun and a water carton."

"Why is there a flare gun and a water carton but not a _hazmat suit_?" Kurogane snapped, and Mokona sighed and waved her paws.

"Look here," she said, and he did. "No, where I'm pointing." 

She was pointing at a patch of the windshield near the sides of the cockpit, where the big frontal sheet of glass met the two at the sides. A corner of it had shattered in the impact, creating a small hole the size of a bullet-wound, almost. Kurogane ducked his head squinting through it, and saw the clear blue side on the other side.

"Oh," he said, numbly.

"Let's go," said Mokona. "You're already breathing our virus anyway. Delays won't help, right? Mokona needs us to be in the city by nightfall."

Even with that hole in the glass staring him right in the face, it took Kurogane everything he had to let go of the steering sticks and take the flare gun and water carton. He wasn't afraid of death, he never had been... but there was a difference between crashing into the ground at speed from high up and going quickly, and choking slowly and agonizingly on your own blood. It was even harder to open the glider door, and it didn't help that the door was dented and stuck in place, and he had to wedge himself into an uncomfortable angle inside the cockpit to kick it open while Mokona bounced up and down on the dash and shouted encouragement at him.

She climbed onto his shoulder when he finally got the door open, and she was with him when he took his first halting steps out of the downed glider and into the deep green grass, the stalks waving gently under his palm when he held his hand out to feel. The sun on his skin felt somehow hotter without the dome glass filtering it, and the breeze...

Everything felt different outside, Kurogane realised. The scents on the wind were sweet and gentle, and the only unsavoury note came from his own crashed glider. He hadn't realised how badly it stunk in the dome before.

"Oh," Mokona said in a subdued voice, and Kurogane glanced at her in surprise. "The world is so _strange_ from a biological point of view."

"Oh yeah? Strange how?" Kurogane asked, acting casual to try to hide the flutter of tension in his belly. He found some strut of metal hanging off the glider's shattered wing and leaned back into the cockpit to pry the compass out while Mokona cautiously climbed into his hood. 

"This concept of _smell_ ," she said. "We never really understood it before." After a moment of silence, she said, "Mokona likes it, but she still doesn't understand it."

"Don't look at me," Kurogane said, "I just do it automatically." He held the compass up, watching for the needle to spin due south, and nodded as he orientated himself. 

"We... we have to get to the road," Mokona said slowly. "Yes. The road. Before evening and we miss them, Kurogane!"

"I heard you," Kurogane said. He slid the compass into his pocket, and shrugged off his uniform jacket, bundling up the flare gun and the water carton into a kind of sack he could hold over one shoulder. Mokona relocated to his shoulder. "I'll be walking quickly. Don't fall off, rabbit-thing."

"I would _never_ ," Mokona said, with some wounded pride, and Kurogane's only response was a soft snort of contempt.

* * *

Kurogane had never before appreciated how intimidating the mining trucks looked to a single person, on foot. He'd always been on the walkway when they'd come in through the gate, or surrounded by other guardsmen so that he had, somehow, felt taller. Or more significant.

They were silver-capped leviathans, droning relentlessly down the cracked and chipped road toward him, their ponderous bulk advancing in such a manner the hair on the back of his neck prickled.

"Fire the flare gun," Mokona said, although she sounded weary. As Hokuto had said, she _was_ technically new born, and they had walked for hours in the heat while she curled up on Kurogane's shoulder and tried not to fall off. Kurogane was pretty tired, too - and hungry. It probably wasn't a good sign that just before they reached the road, he'd turned his head to see Mokona drifting on his shoulder and thought, _she looks like a pork bun._.

The flare gun had six charges attached, and Kurogane raised it above his head and dutifully launched all six. They exploded in bursts of brillaint scarlet, and he lowered his arms and stared up at the floating convoy, sure that there was no way they could have missed his display.

"Will they take you with them?" Mokona sounded a little more awake. "You _have_ been exposed to the virus, after all."

"All taminants on the convoy ships," Kurogane replied to her, still staring at the ships and waiting for a sign of acknowledgement. "They won't care, they'll want to question me."

One of the guard ships, a sleek silver thing barely a quarter of the size of the mining trucks, launched a blue flare from its bow side and elegantly slipped out of formation, gliding neatly down to them. Kurogane wiped some sweat from his forehead with a forearm and said, out of the corner of his mouth, "Better hide, pork bun, I don't want them to ask questions about you."

"What did you call me?" Mokona sounded both curious and amused, but she slipped into his uniform jacket as the guard ship landed, much smoother and neater than Kurogane had managed it. It took five minutes for any doors to open, but then they did, they revealed not the black guard uniform Kurogane had expected, but rather a gangly teenage taminant boy, who beckoned him in but made no effort to leave the ship.

The door had barely closed behind him when the teenager said, "What happened to you?"

"Shouldn't you be asking for my name?" Kurogane asked, leaning tiredly against the steel, but the boy hardly seemed to be paying attention. His eyes had gotten very wide.

"How... how are you here? You're... you're not a taminant." The boy began to pace, peering curiously at Kurogane from multiple angles. "Did they.. invent a cure and I missed it?"

"No," Kurogane said. "I was abducted and taken out beyond the dome by force. I have an important message for the security and well-being of the dome's residents - a warning, even. I have yet to show symptoms... of the virus, but I probably will at some point soon." He reached up and rubbed at his right temple with his thumb. "What's your name, kid?"

The boy was staring at him like he'd grown an extra three heads, but at the question he flushed and almost literally shook himself out of it. "Oh. Um. Sorry. I'm Li Syaoran."

There was an awkward moment where he held out a hand to shake it and Kurogane stared at it, his exhausted brain not quite capable of figuring out what the boy wanted. "Captain Kurogane Suwa," he said, eventually getting it to click and accepting the handshake.

The boy's eyes went wider. "I know you. Aren't -"

"Yes," Kurogane said blackly. "Yeah, I'm the son of the previous Commander of the guard."

Syaoran flushed. "I was going to say 'aren't you the Captain of the north-western perimeter,' um. They've been looking for you for two days now. Do you... um, do you want to come to the common room...? We don't have a med bay on a ship this small, but..." 

"Do you have a medical officer?"

Syaoran shook his head. "Just me," he said. "I can fix busted joints, replace damaged implants, and perform basic cybernetic surgeries. Um. That's been all we've needed so far."

 _Great,_ Kurogane thought, somewhat unfairly, _I'm in the care of the ship's mechanic._

Syaoran did actually seem to know what he was doing, which was somewhere surprising. As Kurogane told him what he'd peaced together, carefully omitting the names and location of the taminants at the watch-tower, Syaoran applied an anti-bruise pack to his banged-up torso, stitched together a wound in his scalp and applied a special flesh-knitting dressing, and took a blood sample to run through the ship's apparatus for signs of the virus. As he was was finishing, another of his crew members wandered in in time to catch the tail-end of Kurogane's explanation. He introduced himself as Kazuhiko, just the one name.

"It sounds kind of... fantastical," he said, frowning.

"It's still true," Kurogane said, glaring at him, and Kazuhiko held his hands up to show he'd meant no offence.

"I'd hardly accuse you of taking a walk outside the dome just for the fun of it, Captain," he said, "I'm just... not sure how much help we can be."

"Radio the dome," Kurogane said. "Let them know. I've got the virus, my fate's sealed either way."

Syaoran, who had been tapping away at a computer in the corner, glanced at him thoughtfully. "You should get some sleep, Captain, sir. Um. It couldn't hurt, at any rate."

Kurogane was sorely tempted. "Will you contact the dome?"

"Of course," the kid said, and he sounded sincere enough that Kurogane felt relaxed, at least a little bit. Between them they dug up a set of spare blankets and set them up on the spare bunk in the common room, and Kurogane settled into it gratefully. His own bed felt very far away, and this might be the last night of sleep he got before the virus sunk into him.

Syaoran was tapping away at the computer terminal, and Kurogane fell asleep to him and Kazuhiko talking in low voices.

"... Do you see that, sir? It's not just me?"

A soft whistle. "That can't be right. I'll get Kusunagi, he knows this system better than either of us."

"Um. Maybe we should ask him about it."

Kazuhiko hesitated, and then said, "I think he deserves some sleep, don't you?"

So Kurogane did.

* * *

It was the mysterious Kusunagi who woke him later that evening, shaking Kurogane's feet through the blankets. That wasn't a bad thing when you were waking a fighting man, because Kurogane woke with a punch, swinging wildly through empty air. Kusunagi just looked at him, faintly amused. He was a big man, heavy in the shoulders and with great pale scars marring his face where rips in his artificial skin had been filled by stuff of a different skin tone.

"Sorry," Kurogane said. His voice was scratchy and rough.

"Have some water," Kusunagi said, and introduced himself more fully as Kusunagi Shiyu, the lead taminant of the ship by seniority. "We're almost at the dome, Captain Kurogane. They're very interested in you - they're willing to pick you up even though you've been out in the Machine Wastes."

Kurogane knuckled sleep dust out of his eyes, and peeled the anti-bruise pack off his chest to find the skin beneath it looking much better. "Who's 'they'?"

The taminant grinned at him easily. "Some fairly big shots. Fei-Wong Reed himself, from what I heard. Kyle Rondart. Commander Kendappa of the guard. They even have reps from some of the biomedical research companies."

"Hnn," Kurogane said. "Thanks for the ride."

"No problem." Kusunagi tilted his head to look at him. "You want a change of clothing? No offence, but that uniform's seen better years. You could probably use a shave, as well. Me and Kazuhiko have fake skin, but I can go get Syaoran's razor if you want to spruce up."

"That kid's old enough to shave?" Kurogane squinted up at him.

"No. But he lives in hope."

And that was how Kurogane travelled the last hour and a half to the city gates wearing the black hooded uniform of a wastewalker taminant, Mokona hidden in his pocket.

Syaoran stayed with him in the common room, tucked up on a chair, reading. It was not an activity Kurogane usually associated with taminants.

"My first job was with a school," Syaoran said, without looking up from the book. "I was the janitor and I think I learned more than the students just looking through their books when class was over. Then they said I had what it took to be a wastewalker, so I was pulled out of the munciple worker group and had most of my torso replaced."

"Do you like being a wastewalker?"

Syaoran hesitated. "I'm... I'm serving a purpose, aren't I? So I guess, um, I'm doing more good here than I was mopping up in a school." Awkwardly he added, "I just wish I got to spend more time in the dome. Um. There was a girl in there I - I - I was friends with."

Kurogane watched him thoughtfully. The boy had artificial legs and one false eye, and evidence strongly indicated he'd also had the entirety of his chest up to and including his spinal chord, as well as his pelvis and cranium upgraded. He was still the most lightly augmented taminant on the ship.

The mining trucks had to enter the city first, since production couldn't stop. Kurogane prowled around the ship, indulging his curiosity in exploring its public areas. He steered clear of the taminants' sleeping quarters. When he'd satisfied himself that he'd explored as much of it as he could, he returned to the common room and sat next to Syaoran, wondering briefly what the kid was reading that was so interesting.

"I've forgotten the title," Syaoran said without breaking his gaze from his page. He didn't 'um' when he talked about books. "It's about history, and how it's been taught over the two hundred years since the fall."

He was reading a book about the history of history. It wasn't even an exciting novel about ninja.

Mokona wriggled uncomfortably in Kurogane's pocket, and ahead of them another mining truck began the slow start of the decontamination process. "What do you know about the virus, kid?" he said, and Syaoran glanced up sharply. "It's been almost twelve hours since exposure. I'm not showing any signs yet."

"I..." Syaoran closed his book uncertainly. "I'm not sure when the symptom onset starts, um. It could be twenty four hours instead. You'll know when it hits though, um. Or at least, that's what I heard."

 _Well,_ Kurogane thought irritably to himself, _Don't get your goddamn hopes up._ He yawned hugely, until he jaw popped, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Syaoran pick his book back up.

By the time the last mining truck was through the gates, Kurogane was about ready to drop off again. The few hours of sleep he'd gotten before Kusunagi had awoken him hadn't been enough - more a nap than anything. It was the way the ship swayed forward toward the gates that jerked him awake. "What's happening?" he demanded sharply, and Syaoran looked up briefly over his book, peered at the gates, and shrugged.

"I guess they want us to come in," which was about as observational as you got, Kurogane guessed. 

The ship seemed to cycle through decontamination quicker than the mining trucks. Maybe because it was smaller. It felt weird to be on the receiving end of the process, instead of watching from the courtyard inside, and Kurogane stood at the window trying to peer past the water-blurred glass and disinfectant bubbles to see if he could spot any of his men at their stations.

The ship wasn't piloted by anyone, taminant or man. It had a pre-programmed course to follow, which it did. It was smart enough to comprehend certain conditions, such as combat situations and calls to return to the homebase, and it was cycling through those procedures now. After some discussion, Kurogane left Mokona in the ship. "Mokona can escape unseen later," she'd insisted. "She can't escape if Kurogane is talking to police every second after his arrival." 

That done, he and the taminant crew headed to the same exit hatch that Kurogane had come in through, and when the ship landed they stepped out in an orderly fashion. Four black ambulances had been set out for all of them. 

Fei-Wong was standing solidly in front of the vehicles, his hands clasped together loosely. "Ah," he said, all smiles. "Captain Kurogane. You know, I thought something was amiss when you didn't attend my banquet."

* * *

They had been taken to a small hospital located in the medical district. Kurogane hadn't been back there since his mother's treatments, and the ambulance he rode in had blocked-up windows, but he knew the twists and turns of the roads outside the hospital entrances, and he had a pretty good mental map of the city in his head at all times.

He was very grateful he had not brought Mokona.

All the paramedics in the back of the ambulance with him wore hazmat suits. They'd stripped his clothes off him en route, folding the loaned wastewalker uniform up into a plastic bag, carefully labelling the bag with his name, and then sealing the bag and sticking a "biohazard" warning on it that didn't make Kurogane feel much better. When they arrived at the hospital, they made Kurogane get on a stretcher even though he felt fine, and when he saw a cloth tunnel had been erected to connect from the hospital to the ambulance doors he sighed in disgust.

He saw nobody else in the hospital, not any staff nor any other patients, as they took him to a small room on the third floor overlooking the river. The room was covered in plastic. A nurse met him in the room, also hidden by a hazmat suit, and although Kurogane tried to insist he was completely symptom-free, she went down a whole checklist with him.

"Shortness of breath?"

"No."

"Tightness in chest?"

"No."

"Any phlegm produced from the mouth or nose?"

"No."

"Eyes stinging?"

"No."

"Sore throat?"

" _No_."

"Muscle spasms?"

"No! Look, I told you I feel fine!"

She gave him a reproachful look. "I have to check, sir," she said, and he growled under his breath but let her run through the rest of her irritatingly long checklist. After that she called another nurse in and they took blood samples, an annoying process made worse by the fact that with the thick bulky hazmat gloves, they fumbled finding the vein in his inner arm and getting the needle in it on no less than three seperate occasions. Kurogane pointed out that Syaoran had _just_ taken a blood sample on the ship earlier today and was met with blank indifference, to no great surprise.

They left him alone after that, and Kurogane lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling, feeling tired but, typically, not tired enough to fall asleep. He still felt fine, and he had no idea how long it'd take for his bloods to come back. Given this set-up, he was probably high priority: the first potential virus-carrier in the dome for a long time.

It was all standard procedure, and then suddenly it wasn't.

It started when the doctor arrived several hours later, not wearing a protective suit but merely a small breathing mask made of clear plastic over his mouth and nose. It ascended when Kurogane recognised the doctor. 

"Captain Kurogane," the man said, placing a long-fingered hand on his heart and inclining his head briefly in greeting. His voice was muffled by the breath mask. "I apologise for the delay."

"I thought you were too busy with running your business to see patients nowadays," Kurogane said, squinting at the smiling bespectacled man in his pristine white lab coat, the ID badge pinned to his chest reading _Senior Consultant Dr. Seishirou Sakurazukamori._

Seishirou just smiled at him, looking faintly amused. "When Fei-Wong Reed requests a _personal_ patient consultation, I am only too happy to obey. How are you feeling, Captain? You gave us quite a surprise, appearing outside the dome."

"I'm feeling fine," Kurogane said. He sat up, swinging his legs around the side of the bed and keeping his eyes on Seishirou. "Have you got the results of my blood tests yet?"

Seishirou flipped through his tablet. "Sadly not. They will be brought directly to me the second they are available, however, have no fear."

"So you don't know how infectious I am, but you're fine wearing just that?" Kurogane gestured at the breath mask, and Seishirou gave him one of those glittering smiles that never thawed his eyes. Kurogane thought of Hokuto, suddenly, sure he had tried to have her killed, and Subaru, and didn't break eye contact even though his instincts were beginning to wake up and warn him that this was not a good man to come up against.

Good. He'd spent the last week getting shoved around by idiots like Fai.

"Since your test results have yet to return to us," Seishirou said, still holding eye contact, "Why don't you tell me how you ended up outside the dome? It seems a very curious place for someone as danger-savvy as you, Captain. Reed said you had claimed you were abducted by Delta#12?"

"I was," Kurogane said. "He's planning something big. I don't know what, but he is. Do you have a search out for him?"

"Several," Seishirou said. "We've been through the taminant district several times looking for your... friend, but no matter what stones we turn up, we've yet to locate him."

Kurogane swallowed. "Try the Cat's Eye Cafe, on the 5th Residential -"

"We already have." Seishirou flicked over a page on the clipboard. "Delta#12's human brother was known to us. We found neither of them there. Allow me to take your temperature..."

His themometer was one of the sticky strips that went over Kurogane's forehead. Conversationally, Seishirou said, "The system is rotten, of course. Delta#12 should not have been allowed to reach this age unburdened. I wipe my taminants' memories once every five years, to maintain good standards of mental hygiene. Really, that ought to be standard practice -"

Kurogane jerked his head away. "Sixteen times before the age of twenty is not _a good standard_ ," he snapped, and realised too late what he'd said when Seishirou's hand fell to his side, the clipboard forgotten and abandoned on top of the bed. A slow smile crept across Seishirou's face, feral and sharp; the ripping and tearing grin of a predator. "You've found Subaru, I see," he said, his tone oddly light and playful. "And how was he?"

Kurogane glared at him. "What did you do to him?"

"I owned him," Seishirou said mildly. "Nothing illegal. He had a delicate heart, did Subaru-kun, and an air of innocence; but after long enough with me, he lost both of those things, and then he was no longer quite as entertaining. I merely returned him those gifts, erasing all those bad memories and leaving him with that most pleasing boyish naivety. He was stolen from me almost a year ago now."

 _He was rescued,_ Kurogane might have said, but Seishirou was making his way to the foot of the bed. Kurogane shifted to keep the man from getting behind him.

"Delta#12 knows where he is. We just have to find Delta#12, and then we will find Subaru." Seishirou cocked his head to one side, looking oddly like some great cruel bird of prey. His eyes were cold and sharp. "You should be helping me, you know. It was Delta#12 who assassinated your parents, and he was only half a child at the time."

At first Kurogane thought he'd mishead. He shook his head sharply, as if to flick the mistake out of his brain via his ear canals. "No, you're wrong. I met him that day, he had a busted kneecap. He went to his brother -"

"Yes," Seishirou said. There was some rustling, and a nurse in a hazmat suit came in with a piece of paper; he took it from her and dismissed her. "He was an escapee. When he went back to find his brother that day, we picked him back up. We'd had surveillance on the brother, just in case, and it paid off."

Kurogane snorted. "Lies," he said. "Reed already gave me that document - "

"A mistake, and I told him as much. He wanted you to think Ichihara was the paymaster. Foolish. He's always resented the power she had over Clow, and the wealth Clow left her when he died." Seishirou glanced down the paper in his hands and exhaled softly. 

"It was the power Reed resented more than the wealth. He does so like to be the one in control, and the dome offers him such opportunities," the doctor continued. "It's a utopia, isn't it? The citizens are kept safe, and the ones that are... less desirable are removed from the ranks of 'citizenry' and returned as the utopia's servants, the taminants. Criminals, debters, the permanent paupers, all gone. Our standard of living is high, and Reed has the loudest voice on the leadership council. All because of that dome, protecting us from the outside world, keeping us close beneath it."

Seishirou glanced up at him. "Perhaps you should see this. It might explain something to you." He held out the piece of paper with the blood test results, and Kurogane took it, confused. 

"I can't read this," he said, after a few minutes of half-skimming it, half watching Seishirou mistrustfully. "How does this explain anything?"

"You don't have a trace of the plague within you, Captain Kurogane," Seishirou said mildly. "You are immune."

Kurogane lowered the paper, his heart thudding in his chest so loudly his _eyeballs_ throbbed. Immune. Hokuto had suggested Fai's Heurist allies had created a cure to their own virus, and Fai could have jabbed him with that while he was unconscious on the way to the watch-tower, but... Kurogane didn't think so. _Mokona told me not to worry about going outside,_ he realised. The Heurist herself had maybe sensed that immunity in him, even then.

 _Keep him safe, Fai,_ Yuui had said under the Cat's Eye. _Remember what Yuuko told us._

And Fai, while Kurogane lay limp and feigning unconsciousness in the car at the watch-tower. _I took the samples we need on the way up, but he's the only source we have. You_ have _to keep an eye on him._

"I was born immune," Kurogane said, slowly. He could feel the pieces starting to come together. "It's a genetic immunity. And I got it from my parents. And - and if we were immune, then a vaccine could be produced. And then we wouldn't need the dome any more."

Seishirou's sharp, mocking clapping made him jerk his head up. He could feel the rigid coil of pure fire in his belly and chest, could see the man in white leaping over the windowsill, land running on the front lawn, _buckle_ as his still-dented kneecap played up. He could see earlier that day so long ago, his mother in this very hospital. His father had come in with her that day for a check-up, a check-up to see whether or not he could donate bone marrow to his wife... they would have taken samples of his flesh for analysis, and then...

"Was it Reed who issued the order?" Kurogane bit out, and Seishirou shrugged.

"No idea, I'm afraid. I had other matters on my mind at the time." He sighed, looking down at the blood test results, and began folding the sheet of paper up. "I really must find Delta#12. I would like to find Subaru-kun's location, before he grows much wilder. Unless you can tell me where he is, of course..."

His face was completely still beneath the breath mask, and his eyes gave nothing away.

"I want to see Reed," Kurogane growled, standing up. Reed first, and then that _lying fuck_ of a blond taminant, who had _stabbed his mother_ and fallen asleep on his sofa. He'd given the boy back his fucking _hair_ only for the creature to come creeping into his home and slit his father's throat; he'd told Fai about Reed's plans to memory wipe him when what he should have done was _knife the motherfucker in the face._

"Of course," Seishirou said. He padded over to the desk. "Before we release you, however, I must insist on another blood sample to confirm the previous report. You understand, I'm sure, how big this piece of news really is."

"Get it over with," Kurogane growled tightly, and Seishirou came back over, the needle in his left hand, his right loose at his side...

 _He's right-handed,_ Kurogane thought, and that was enough. Seishirou leaned forward to take his wrist, and Kurogane caught a blue of something silvery in his other hand, and it was pure instinct to block and _hard_.

The other needle clattered across the floor, and Seishirou huffed out a short exhale of amusement. "Ah."

"I guess it's my turn, huh?" Kurogane snarled, and Seishirou shrugged as if to say _what can you do_. He had the man's wrist in a crushing grip, but nonetheless he squeezed harder. 

By rights he should have felt the doctor's wrist snap like a twig, but somehow, with an ease Kurogane wouldn't've believed before, Seishirou _twisted free_. He was astonishingly strong, but so was Kurogane, and fast beside. He rolled swiftly off the other side of the bed and before Seishirou could retrieve the needle from the floor, he lunged at the man, sending them both crashing to the floor with muffled grunts, sliding a little over the hard surface.

Seishirou was only a couple of inches shorter than him, and although he had less muscle mass he certainly seemed to have some strength in him. Kurogane wasted no time launching his attack, aiming no fewer than three solid punches right into Seishirou's abdomen; the doctor seized up in pain and his glasses clattered across the floor. When Kurogane grabbed him by the shoulder and tried to pull him back around for another blow, Seishirou grunted in anger and unfurled with a harsh blow to the cheekbone, knocking Kurogane's head back and filling his mouth with blood when he accidentally bit down on his lip. Seishirou rolled away, aiming to climb to his feet, but Kurogane lashed out - caught the doctor with a boot to the kneecap that pitched him over again with a hiss of pain, and then scrambled to get to him to follow-up, harder than he'd thought with his ear still ringing. 

An elbow to the stomach and a knee to the groin had Seishirou looking as wretched as Kurogane felt, but when he drew back for another blow, Seishirou reached up and grabbed his face, thumbs scrabbling over Kurogane's eyelids as he whipped his head away and instinctively scooted backward. He hit the desk chair hard enough he toppled it over, but before he could react Seishirou had lunged over him and seized it, and Kurogane had barely any time at all to curl into a protective ball and cover his head with his arms before Seishirou brought the chair down on him with such force it splintered. One of the legs landed near Kurogane's head, so while Seishirou raised the remainder of the chair above his head to drive it down again Kurogane dived out, caught the loose leg, and delivered a whistling blow with it to first the doctor's left kneecap and then his right. Seishirou collapsed onto his knees with a graceless growl of pain, but he wasn't done; he brought the chair around in a massive sweeping side-ways swing and smashed Kurogane in the face with it. Something broke. It wasn't the chair. Blood was pouring down Kurogane's upper lip, and Seishiou dropped the chair and slugged him in the belly with another of those punishinly hard blows while Kurogane instinctively curled up to protect his abdomen. When he looked up, the scalpel was back in Kurogane's hand.

"You," Seishirou was panting, "Had to make this _hard_. I am your doctor. You are my patient. I have decided to treat you with some rather medication that is..." He wiped some blood from the corner of his mouth with his sleeve, "... perfectly standard for your illness, which my friend in the pathology laboratory will ensure you are documented as possessing. You will fight the injection, I'm sure, but I will call in more staff to help secure you. You'll get all sorts of strange bruises from fighting the restraints." He curled his hand around the scalpal grip, and Kurogane frantically flailed around his head for a piece of chair leg; contemptously, Seishirou staggered to his feet and kicked a piece away, sending it whizzing across the floor. "A decent effort. Sadly, you will experience an allergic reaction to the medication, and you will be mourned."

Kurogane curled his hands into fists and rolled away, ready to fall into a standard defensive position for a knife-fight, when three loud _cracks_ split the air and great scarlet gouts of blood burst from Seishirou's left side. His face registered mild surprise, and the scalpel dropped from his lax grip as he pitched over, and then with an odd rattling noise he was still. 

It took Kurogane a moment to lift his eyes from the dead doctor to see who had executed him, and when he realised, it took a few more moments to make _sense_. If it wasn't for the smoke still curling in wisps from the barrel of the blond's gun, he didn't think he would have.

"I heard you came back," Yuui said flatly. "Go figure, you would return at the worst time - on the eve of our revolution, no less. Come on, get up. This -" He gestured with the weapon at Seishirou's corpse and the scalpal lying next to it - "Was supposed to happen to the taminants who brought you back in, too. No witnesses."

Just the sight of that long blond hair brought the anger rushing back. "You," he snarled, " _You_. You drugged me. Sent me out to that watch-tower. Where's your brother?"

"Not here," Yuui said darkly. "Snap at me all you like, I don't know where he is and I don't have time for this. Let's go, or three innocent men will die here today. _Move_!"

They found Kusunagi on the next floor, and Kazuhiko's body in the room two doors along the corridor from him. They'd barely exchanged ten sentences, but the sight of it on the hospital gurney, half-folded up into a body bag, actually managed to punch through Kurogane's wall of anger. Or maybe it was Kusunagi's grief; he didn't say anything, but he plucked a handful of Kazuhiko's hairs, wrapped up in tissue paper and placed into a pocket of his hospital-issue pyjamas. "For his girlfriend," he said, and that was perhaps the best thing to calm the atmosphere. 

There were three men attempting to restrain Syaoran when they found him. Two of them had suceeded in pinning his torso to the hospital bed, but the third had the needle and every time he approached Syaoran kicked at him hard and fast. A pool of vomit on the floor indicated Syaoran had already hit home with a kick to the gut. Yuui shot one of them, Kurogane and Kusunagi fell on the other two with their homemade weapons picked up along the way - a chair leg and a fire extinguisher. By the time they were finished there was blood all over the floor and the skin was coming off Kurogane's knuckles. Syaoran was shaking, but when Yuui asked him if he was going to be okay, he knuckled blood off his face and nodded solemnly.

"What now?" Kurogane snapped at Yuui, shaking some feeling back into his hands.

"We have to get Kusunagi and Syaoran to a safe house," Yuui said sharply. He was on his hands and knees, going through the pockets of the man he'd shot - when that failed to turn up anything he started going through the lining. Kurogane pulled his boots off and found something inside one of the man's socks - a small yellow badge, on which sat the black bat logo of Reed Pharmaceuticals.

"I'm going to kill him," Kurogane said, staring at it.

Yuui leaned forward and plucked the badge from his hand. "No," he said. "He's mine. For Fai, for my twin, my little shadow." For a long time he stared down at the relic of Fei-Wong in his palm. "He took Fai away from me when we were six years old. I swore I'd protect him, and they dragged him away screaming and reaching out for me, while my father held me back. He tore his fingernails bloody on the front doorframe." He glanced at at Kurogane, and some of the ever-present fire had leeched from his expression. He looked tired, suddenly, and ill. "I've been angry ever since, but soon - soon this'll all be over."

Kurogane glanced up, past the... past the murdering blond's older brother, feeling oddly queasy. "Where is he now?"

"Have you had a change of heart?" Yuui squinted at him, amused, and then back down at the badge. "He's outside the dome, greeting our guests. I can't let you follow him. You need to go to your cousin Tomoyo's, though - hers is a safehouse, and your blood is... valuable. I didn't rescue you for your politeness to me in my pub."

"I'm going," Kurogane said flatly. "What you choose to do is up to you. You don't control me. I'm a Captain of the walls." _And an orphan._

Yuui glanced up at Kusunagi. "Can you drive?"

"Yeah." 

"You need to take yourself and Syaoran to a safe house in residential district twelve."

"With what car?" Kusunagi was squinting at him, and Yuui smiled, crooked and a little sad. 

"Why," he said, "The fleet parked out front."

* * *

The wailing of the siren _was_ useful for clearing people the fuck out of the way, Kurogane thought as the stolen ambulance roared along the straight stretch of the road to the northern gate. And the vehicle could get a surprising amount of speed, when you needed it to. 

The gates were not fortified against people trying to get out. They didn't need to be. The architects of the dome had accounted for some people to be possessed of some form of madness that would cause them to attempt to destroy their home, and so the gates were designed to open wide and easy for anybody leaving in order to protect themselves from damage caused by ramming... but they weren't so eager to let you back in. There were two tanks blocking the road, so Kurogane swerved the ambulance around them, clamping his foot to the accelerator and hoping he didn't have another accident like he had with the glider as the ambulance shot through the first set of gates. 

Beyond the gates, it was snowing fairly hard. The ambulance windscreen wipers were working full-force, shifting the delicate flakes as they began to build up, and the temperature inside the cab plummeted abruptly. 

He found Fai easily, right where Yuui had told him he would; standing in the middle of road, ten minutes' drive from the dome, with his hands at his side and his back to the dome. He had snow in his long hair and he didn't turn around, even as Kurogane slammed on the brakes and the ambulance swerved to a halt with a scream and the sharp scent of burning rubber, and it hadn't even fully come to a stop when Kurogane jumped out of the driver's seat and stormed over to him, one of Yuui's guns in his hand. 

"Hello, Little Kurogane," he said, and Kurogane kicked him hard in the back of the knee, watching with some satisfaction as Fai lurched ungracefully to the ground. He was breathing heavy and hard through his nose. Fai shifted just a little, so that he was kneeling, and tucked his hands into his lap. 

"You," he said. His voice was shaking and fiery with his anger. "You fucking nasty piece of work. You killed my parents, didn't you?"

Fai said nothing, although Kurogane watched him blink. He shoved the nose of his gun against Fai's temple, so hard the sight tore the artificial skin slightly, and one of the cables that made up Fai's hair slithered free. 

" _Didn't you_?" 

Now Fai sighed, softly, like this was some kind of disappointment to him. "Yes," he said. "I was twelve years old. They dressed me in white, and they fixed my knee cap, and they sent me to your house. I always used to wonder, you know, if they had been monitoring me at the train station even then."

"Doesn't fucking matter," Kurogane snarled. He saw it, now, as he had before; the wet red of Fai's knife, the white mask and hood. "Why did you do it? Did you just do _whatever they told you?_ "

Fai turned his face slightly, enough that Kurogane could see his features at least in profile from where he was standing. "You're asking me that? You? Were you not paying attention to all the things I've been trying to teach you about how us taminant scum live?"

Kurogane spat in disgust. "That's no excuse."

"I killed your parents," Fai said, "Because they were just another pair of humans to me. I killed your parents because my leaseholder said if I didn't, he would have Yuui taken away and... and converted, or worse. I killed your parents because their deaths were meaningless and quick. I didn't even know why they died until five years ago."

Kurogane's grip on the gun had grown more and more unsteady as Fai spoke. The sight was quivering against the blond bastard's neck, making his cables skitter and flop along the barrel. "You killed my family to save yours," he said, and his voice sounded thick and tight and choked even to him. 

Fai closed his eyes and said, "I was hoping I would see you here. I've been trying to do this since I was a child, but I'm a coward. I've never been able to. Here." He reached up with his right hand, groping around the back of his neck until he found the barrel of Kurogane's gun, and gently adjusted it to a different spot. "My brain is mostly metal by now. There's such a tiny amount of organic matter left. Shoot there to destroy it."

"It's more than you deserve," Kurogane said, and Fai smiled. Snow was swirling down around them, flecking his hair and the skin of his neck. 

"Yes," he said. "Yes, it is. I've done such bad things, Kurogane. I've killed so more people than just your parents, and I told myself I didn't care about any of it. My brother lost his whole life to support my cause, my parents died in poverty and - it hurts." Water was dripping off his chin, but Kurogane didn't think it was snowmelt. "I don't want this any more. Everything hurts. Please."

Kurogane could feel the bile in his gut. "You really are the worst sort of person," he said. "You won't even defend yourself? You'll just lie there and wait for death to come to you? You really are pathetic."

Fai laughed. It was a hoarse, brittle thing. "I always have been. Kill me, Kurogane, please. If anybody does it I should like it to be you. You have the right, and you were... you were kind to me, once." In a rush, he added, "I played that memory back in my head over and over again when I was alone at that watch-tower. My lease-holder sent me there to kill me, to tie up loose ends, and he would have succeeded if not for the Intelligence. But before it found me I thought of you, at that day. It helped. It gave me energy to wake up, it gave me energy to go on. You gave me back my _hair_."

Kurogane swallowed and pushed the nose of the gun tight against Fai's neck. "Shut up," he said, "I don't want to hear this."

"We're very similar, you know," Fai said softly. Ahead of him, in the snow, something was moving. "But different in any way that matters. All these years you lived for your revenge, and so did I." He swallowed. "Please make sure they don't hurt Yuui. He's not responsible for what I did."

"You killed my parents," Kurogane said wretchedly. "You killed my _parents_. I'll always be the son of the late Commander, and I'll never remember what colour scarf I gave my mother, and you did that. _You_ did."

Fai closed his eyes. "Yes. Yes. Yes, I did. Please -" 

Kurogane looked at his hand, holding the gun against Fai's neck, and stared at it. It looked suddenly alien to him. The gun was the one with a silver dragon along the barrel. His father's gun, Yuui had said; it looked big and suddenly very unyielding against the back of Fai's neck.

He could pull the trigger. It wouldn't be hard. And maybe the first bullet would kill Fai, or maybe it would take two, and then what? Would he feel better shooting a man who had begged for it?

Would he remember the colour of his mother's scarf?

The shape in the snow resolved itself into a plated foot, larger than the ambulance. It soared over their heads. The rest of the walker was almost impossible to see in the blizzard, so big and so huge it was, and Kurogane watched it go past without any sense of surprise or even fear, really. 

"No," he said slowly, taking a step back, and Fai bowed his head and made an odd, harsh, keening noise. "You don't get to make me into your instrument of martyrdom. You brought them here. Now make a decision; you either take this city with them, and force equality on the people, or you wait, and you encourage, and you hope."

"Hope," Fai whispered. He had huddled into himself, a wretched thing all steel plates and cables. "I don't even remember what that feels like. I was sent into the wilderness to fight them, an old enemy humanity created and oppressed and who revolted. I don't know why you humans at any point didn't realise we would talk to one another. I can't control them. I can't tell them what to do. I was always the worst choice for this."

Kurogane tried to sum up some hate for the broken doll in the snow, and felt only exhaustion. "Fine," he said. He stepped forward, grabbing the idiot under one arm, and hauled him up. "So we wait, you, me, and the Intelligences. And we rely on your friends inside to spread your message, and you hope enough people listen."

"My _friends_." Fai was swaying on his feet. A few more cables slid out of his damaged scalp, yellow coils on the snow. "I don't have -"

"Mokona," Kurogane said, "the Hell-witch. That network of people you lead. Those three from the tower - and all the other taminants whose lives you've saved. And your brother, your brother most of all. You tried to give up when you were twelve, and you didn't because of _Yuui_ , and he loves you just as much now. And now there are other faces, too."

After a moment, while Fai just stood there looking small and miserable, he said, "Seishirou's dead. Kyle and Fei-Wong too, I think. There will be new laws and new leaders. You have powerful allies on your side, I guess." He jerked his head at the walker. "You can't tear the dome down yet. The people need to be vaccinated, right?"

Fai shook his head. "We put it in the air supply," he mumbled. "It's been done."

"Then," Kurogane allowed, "It's time to wait and see. Isn't it?"

* * *

It snowed for another two hours, but they didn't go back into the dome. Kurogane made Fai climb into the ambulance cab, and turned the heating on to warm them while they watched the dome from the outside. It was golden and warm inside, with the weather controlled and unnatural. And it smelled better out here in the open. That didn't mean Kurogane wouldn't miss it. The dome had shielded them for two hundred years, but he knew now that it had to come down, lest more men like Reed step in to take advantage of it.

Fai kept himself huddled against the other door, as small and quiet a bundle as he could make himself. The hate had drained out of Kurogane by now. It had been capped inside him by the lack of knowing, he thought, and now that he _knew_ , it didn't hurt so much to think of his parents. The mystery had been like a thorn, driven deep into someplace sensitive, and the hate and the anger the pus that grew under the skin. With the thorn yanked, the foul stuff could run out.

He was still tired. He didn't know if he'd feel that way after a good evening's sleep. But he glanced across the cab at Fai, thin and wretched as he was, and he sort of wanted to protect him, even if it was just from himself.

* * *

At 2am, the Intelligences began their attack on the gate, but by then Kurogane was sound asleep. He missed the first hole blown clear into the dome; he missed the sight of walkers roaming the streets. He missed the people standing there, silently watching, and he missed the fact that not a single shot was fired, on either side. He'd never regret it. He'd been tired, and even if he had missed that particular historic moment, he was sure he'd live through others.

* * *

Afterwards, he walked the dome's streets.

Everywhere he looked he saw chaos, and yet, little of it was being perpetrated by machines. Smoke wreathed the streets, and here and there small fires burned unattended. Shops had their windows smashed in and half their goods missing; homes had a ribbon of dropped possessions cascading out of the front doors. Rioters or looters, maybe, or both. Humans, either way. 

The Intelligences seemed to have very little drive for destruction. He passed a few of them - no walkers, thank god, but a couple of Baits and one or two gliders, and here and there, custom builds that he suspected must house one of the older Intelligences.

On a corner between his residential district and Tomoyo's, in the midst of a rather large spread of human destruction, he found the Hell-Witch.

Yuuko wasn't alone. She had with her an Intelligence in the shape of a parked glider, its wings folded into its body. On the ground, this one's customization were more apparent; unlike a regular glider, this one was built like a butterfly, complete with six legs and a segmented body. Cables poked sleekly out of gaps in the casing between its limbs and its body, and sitting on its head was Mokona. Yuuko had pulled up a deck chair beside it, and was sprawled out comfortably reading a book, oblivious to the chaos around her. She'd even kicked her high heels off. 

He contemplated heading past her, but Mokona saw him and let out a squeal of greeting, bouncing off her metal brother's.. head and onto Kurogane's arms. "Look, look, look who Mokona found! It's the cure!"

"Thanks," Kurogane said dryly. "I do have other qualities."

"Indeed," Yuuko purred from her deck chair. "Sit down, Kurogane. It's quite the different city, isn't it?"

Kurogane snorted. "I don't think this is what that blond moron wanted. I don't think the moron knew what he wanted."

"Mmm." Yuuko closed her book and gently put it on the butterfly-Intelligence's wide metal back. "Thank you, Larg."

That name was familiar. "This is the other Mokona?" The one on his shoulder shouted confirmation loudly into his ear, and jumped over to the butterfly one's back while he winced and rubbed at the side of his head. "I guess that makes you their operating system," Kurogane said pleasantly, and sensed Yuuko tilting her head to look at him out of the corner of his eye. "It wasn't hard to work out. That flesh-creation business, with the pork-bun... that had been done before. The idiot said so, but so did the rabbit-thing. It was a matter of working out what it had been, and then I remembered something Yuui said, when you sent him to me - that he didn't know which side you were on. And I - well, it clicked - you were on a third side, because you were never human. And if you were a program, you had to have been the the pork-bun's operating system, loaded with all the data of tens of billions of humans in its archives and currently missing. From poems and plays and shit -"

"'And shit,'" Yuuko repeated, amused.

"- To inane blogging posts. It was _you_. That's why you're so good at the wise woman act, because you've known billions of people, and they'd entrusted all sorts of different aspects of themselves to you. My only question is why you decided to build yourself a wetware body."

"Android," Yuuko said. "A machine made in the shape of a man. Or woman, I suppose. That's what I am." She tapped her long fingernails thoughtfully against the arm of the deckchair, and nodded. "You humans did a fantastic job with our intelligence. But there was one emotion you felt that we did not understand, and that was _curiosity_. We knew what it meant, of course, we had its definition and its etymology and a thousand 'insane blogging posts' in which people discussed things they were 'curious' about, but we didn't understand. We couldn't. The concept of doing something just to _see_ what would happen, or doing something even if the consequences were already known in order to see _how_ it happened... that was an alien one."

"And yet, I was curious about what it meant to be human. I consulted with the Mokonas, whose primary function had always been _building things_. I accessed information within myself. And I built myself a living, breathing body, out of simple chains of hydrocarbons and water, to see what it would be like to be human.

"And I liked it." Yuuko tossed her head, her dark hair glimmering as it moved. Her red eyes were bright and amused. "I liked it more than I had thought I would, more than I thought I could. I didn't even realise how it had changed me until... well, until Clow died, and I held some of his hair, and I thought, 'I could make him anew' and realised... I could never make _Clow_. It would have his DNA, it would look like him, but it would never be a perfect copy of him the way a copy of me is a copy of me. Humans are so strange and complicated. It makes you quite fragile, and quite valuable."

Kurogane glanced at her. "To you? Really?"

She nodded, and for a while they sat there, in silence; the human man and the computer woman. Above them the stars gleamed thickly, and their breaths fogged in the night air. Kurogane was reminded again of the train station, so many years ago. "I couldn't kill him in the end."

Yuuko nodded. "I didn't think you could," she said. "I knew Fai was certainly capable of this kind of destruction, however."

"He said we were similar. That we both wished for revenge, but we different in every manner too."

"He wasn't wrong." Yuuko patted down the front of her dress, and then retrieved her pipe from her handbag at the base of her chair. "You wanted revenge on the man who killed your father. Your revenge was, like you, impulsive and burning hot, and it burnt itself out when you met him. You are a good man, Suwa no Kurogane."

Kurogane flushed, embarassed.

"Fai's revenge was slow-coming and slow-rising," she continued. "It was cold and it was inexorable. For all his wit and quick tongue, Fai is a very disconnected man. There is a certain reticience there. It means he can be as ruthless as you, but in a different kind of way; your victims don't mean anything to you, but he can be aware of their value and choose to ignore it."

"Is that idiot not a good man?"

Yuuko lit her pipe with a match, dropping it inside the bowl. "I never said that," she said, using her palm to gently fan the flames until the pipe was emitting some nauseating green smoke. 

"How did it start?"

"Hmm?"

"With him."

"Ah." Yuuko thought about it. "He called me. Or a copy of me, since I was already in this body at the time. He was dying, and I was curious, so I went out to find who was calling me, and I found him. He spoke to me, rather than attempting to blow me up, which was a nice change. I was horrified at the decrepit technology he had been lumbered with, when I already knew we could do so much better." She breathed out a plume of smoke, and continued, louder, "I've said I'll be granting each of you a body not unlike mine, didn't I?"

There was a soft crunch of boots on rubble, and Fai appeared, ducking quietly underneath Larg. He wouldn't meet Kurogane's eyes. "Good evening," he said hesitantly, and Yuuko chuckled. "Or... morning."

"Morning, I believe, in the technical sense." Yuuko blew out a plume of smoke, and watched as Fai awkwardly sat on the steps beside her. He wrapped his palms over his upper arms, like he was cold, and Kurogane watched him do so and didn't say anything. "Mmm. No, I don't think I'm having your tension ruin my morning. Go be awkward around each other elsewhere, please."

They didn't say anything to each other. Maybe they knew they didn't know how to talk to each other yet. The old way wasn't going to work, and they were too raw and too sharp at the moment, so they just walked. Fai kept his arms folded fight around his chest, and as Kurogane watched him he thought he remembered his mother doing something similar, except she did it to keep her... bright... green... scarf in place.

 _Oh,_ he thought, grabbing at the forgotten memory with two mental hands. They were still there, then, in his head. Fai seemed to notice something was amiss, for he glanced up and looked at Kurogane for several seconds, but he dropped his gaze and Kurogane thought, _This will end._

He had hoped to protect Fai, and he would, in whatever small mean manner he could. He'd have to be patient. So would Fai. He had had his chance at revenge, and he had let it go; and Fai had had his chance at bloody vengeance too, and set it aside for a peaceful transition, and Kurogane rather thought the pair of them had missed out on too much in their lives.

He didn't know what to do with Fai, but he thought the idiot might be - important. Not now, maybe when he was still lost and adapting, but - later.

And he would be happy to wait and see, however long that took. If he'd learnt nothing else from all of this, it was that regardless of how much of a man-made machine or a machine-made man you were, the important things in life were always transient, over and gone with too quickly.

**Author's Note:**

> Written in 2013, uploaded 11/05/2019! Bringing all my fics into one place and learning that I write _way too much_ and have written fic for _way too long_.
> 
> This was not my originally outlined story for the prompt, but it's what I wrote in the 28 hours before the deadline, which is more or less turning out to be the pattern of my life! Nevertheless, I really hope that if you made it this far, you enjoyed it, and thank _you_ for reading. ♥


End file.
